Recovery Mentoring & Support Service

We want to to let you know about a new service we have developed which we believe will offer significant additional support in helping to further develop recovery practice within and across mental health services.

Through our work with many different kinds of mental health services internationally, we have identified a significant need for external ongoing support and advice for service users, workers and managers. The recovery approach is an innovative way of working and services seeking to introduce this way of working are often isolated and working within more traditional service structures.

We intend to meet this need by providing a mentoring support service that aims to assist services and individuals in their work of supporting individual recovery journeys. This includes embedding and further developing the practical implementation of recovery orientated services.

We hope the service will be of interest to you, if you would like to discuss how it could be utilised by your organisation or would like further information please contact me at ron@workingtorecovery.co.uk or telephone me on 01851 810 060.

Our mentoring services aims to complement and support the management of change in the development of recovery work.

Objectives

For the recovery approach to be successful it is essential that individuals are supported and enabled in their “recovery journey” by effective and committed mental health workers and services.

It will ensure that the services provided are actually helping individuals move towards recovery from the many, varied and unique responses to experiencing mental health problems / distress.

The mentoring service will do this by providing an opportunity for mental health workers to:

  • gain new perspectives
  • evaluate current service responses
  • set goals and priorities
  • implement the best recovery outcomes in partnership with the people they work with

The Mentoring Service

The mentoring service will be delivered by utilising video conferencing facilities. This technology will enable participants to undertake mentoring within the workplace at their own desks or in a suitable meeting room with internet access. This will be , through the use of Skype conferencing services which will allow the mentor and mentee to talk to and see each other in high quality video in real time as well as being able to access information such as links, documents etc via the Skype messaging service.

We have put together a group of associates consisting of experienced recovery professionals and people who have undertaken recovery journeys who are available to provide regular one to one mentoring and group mentoring sessions.

One to One Mentoring: This is a more intensive form of mentoring and is suitable for individuals undertaking recovery journeys, managers, key workers and others who would benefit from a personalised approach. The focus of the sessions would be on addressing the issues and challenges in developing recovery services or undertaking a recovery journey. We would match one of our recovery associates with the mentee according to their needs and circumstances. The sessions are monthly (or more often if required) and would be made up of 10 sessions over the course of a year.

Group Mentoring: This would be for up to six participants and would be suitable for team members and service users either within an individual service or across services. The focus of the sessions would be on addressing the issues and challenges in developing recovery practice or undertaking recovery journeys. We would match one of our recovery associates with the mentees according to their needs and circumstances. The sessions could be monthly (or more often if required) and would be made up of 10 sessions over the course of a year.

Mentoring sessions can be organised in the following ways:

Mentoring for individual workers

  • Mentoring for individual service users
  • Mentoring for groups of workers (within a service or across services)
  • Mentoring for groups of service users
  • Mentoring for mixed groups

Mentors include:

Mentoring Process

The focus of our mentoring approach is to develop capacity of organisations and individuals to help deliver recovery practice by providing a mentor who will:

  1. Make a commitment that involves taking part in the learning and development process side-by-side with the mentee.
  2. Preparing the mentee to embrace changes in the way they work and to work through the personal and professional challenges that arise in developing recovery work or undertaking recovery journeys.
  3. Assisting in the development of different ways of thinking, a change in processes or a re-ordering of values.
  4. Using our own experiences to help the mentee to develop skills and activities that foster the recovery practice.
  5. We will continue to evaluate the experience of the mentee by asking key questions such as “What have you learned?”, “How useful is it?”.

Costs: On application

For further information on our new service and to discuss costs etc please email Karen Taylor at karen@workingtorecovery.co.uk.