Background: Mental health services are being encouraged to adopt a recovery approach, creating a requirement for standardised measures of recovery to be developed and embedded within services. Measurement of this unique concept is inherently difficult, but it is feasible and valid provided that service users and clinicians work collaboratively.
Aims: To evaluate which measures of recovery have clinical utility and are acceptable to service users.
Method: Instruments included in this review are (1) quantitative self-report measures, (2) published in a peer reviewed English language journal and (3) designed to measure personal recovery. The review team included two service-user researchers to allow evaluation of acceptability to service users.
Results: Twenty-five measures of recovery were identified; six of these met the inclusion criteria. A summary table of the measures is included to enable readers to make an informed choice of measure for their specific needs, along with an overview of each measure.
Conclusions: The Recovery Assessment Scale appears to be the most acceptable and valid measure currently available. No "gold-standard" measure of recovery has been developed to date. Further research is required to examine the longitudinal reliability of existing tools, and their utility within clinical services and as outcome measures.