Recovery Colleges and Universities: an obvious partnership with enormous potential

Introduction: Recovery Colleges are a rapidly expanding international innovation, promoting personal recovery whilst transforming mental health services and communities.  Whilst Recovery Colleges vary their funding, operation and characteristics, a uniting feature is their educational approach; all involved become ‘students’ learning from one another, and many Colleges adopt practices such as prospectuses and semesters to instil this philosophy.  In Australia, complex commissioning contexts challenge the resourcing and sustainability of Recovery Colleges.  Our aim was to understand models of Recovery Colleges formed through tertiary educational institutions and community organisations/ health providers partnerships, and to explore feasibility and potential benefits of this in an Australian context.    



Methods: We conducted a brief scoping exercise, connecting internationally with researchers and communities of practice to identify existing Recovery Colleges with university partnerships.  We then held discussions with these Recovery Colleges about their contexts, benefits and challenges.  These models were then discussed with staff from an Australian University and local community organizations to explore their perspectives on the potential benefits and challenges of these models in their context.    



Results: 32 partnerships were identified (with likelihood of many more undocumented instances).  Models varied in their funding structures, management, course codesign, delivery and attendance, with tertiary education institutions involved in different ways and extents.  Numerous anecdotal benefits were reported, regarding additional opportunities for Recovery College students and wider community impact and cultural transformation.  Further potential advantages were identified for the specific Australian context, where joining of Universities and Recovery Colleges was seen as a potential solution to current challenges. 



Conclusion: Community organisations and tertiary education can collaborate to deliver Recovery Colleges in different mutually advantageous ways.  Universities could play a role in supporting implementation of Recovery Colleges as a systemic and sustainable element of Australian mental healthcare innovation, but further research is required to evidence this model.