Abstract
Burgess and colleagues' [1] recent article presenting the Australian Review of Recovery Measures heralds a welcome step forward in Australian policy, and we applaud the suggestion that both individual recovery and the recovery-orientation of services be assessed.
The review reveals that, although there are some differences in the domains chosen for measures of individual recovery, there is broad agreement on the construct. In a recent article we demonstrated empirically that not only is there strong agreement on what recovery is and how it should be measured, but also that recovery measures have the potential to contribute valuable additional information to complement more traditional clinical outcome measures [2].
We found that although there were a few recovery domains that did not correlate strongly, most domains of the Recovery Assessment Scale, the Mental Health Recovery Measure and the Self Identified Stage of Recovery – Part B (SISR-B) correlated strongly [2]. Furthermore, we found that these domains largely increased across stage of recovery as assessed using the SISR – Part A (SISR-A)[2]. So while there is still room for refinement in recovery measurement, there is strong agreement on most elements of the construct.
Conversely, we found that a number of mandatory outcome measures used in Australia did not demonstrate a strong relationship with the recovery measures. The subscales of the Health of the Nation Outcome Scales, the Life Skills Profile and the Global Assessment of Functioning showed at best very weak correlations with any of the recovery measures, and no pattern of consistent increase across stage, as assessed by the SISR-A. These important findings provided empirical evidence of the need to expand the set of routine assessment tools to include measures of the consumer concept of recovery.
As well as providing empirical evidence for the value of recovery as an aspect of routine outcome assessment, the study provided construct validation for the SISR. The added advantage of brevity, and that it was developed and tested in Australia, makes the SISR a strong contender for inclusion in the short list of measures for further testing, particularly if the stages of recovery were to be emphasised.