Grant: Catalyst Grant: Patient-Oriented Research

Despite the introduction of the recovery-oriented mental health care in the late 1980s, a philosophy that holds social inclusion as one of its most significant goals, people with lived experience of mental health challenges still confront a number of social inequities, including high rates of under-employment and low rates of educational achievement. To address these inequalities, Recovery Colleges (RCs) were developed with the intention of creating low-barrier opportunities to discover, define and achieve personal recovery goals. There is some research that states patients who participate in RCs don't use as many heath services. But how are they evaluating RCs to be able to say that? Our team of patient/students, researchers and health providers are mainly interested in how RCs are evaluated and whether the patients' voice is included in the creation of evaluations. For that, we will look at all of the literature on recovery colleges that describe evaluation. In addition, because we believe that the work we do must include the perspective of those who participate in RCs, we will conduct interviews to help figure out what things should we be evaluating that we did not find in the literature on RCs. We want to know which recovery-oriented outcomes matter most to patients/students of the RCs. Most evaluations developed in healthcare settings tend to measure the outcomes that are important to staff or the organization rather than those of the patient. Partnering with patients/students to shape how RCs are evaluated will ensure that the identified outcomes are relevant and important to the users of the program. The aim of this research is to do this pilot work together so we can apply for a larger grant. Our next grant can focus on taking what we found and co-creating an actual evaluation for RCs that can be conducted across our three sites.