Hope

Promoting a culture of hope

Promoting a culture of hope: Creating and sustaining a service culture of hope is essential to ensuring an organisational environment that encourages and supports people's recovery efforts. Everyone participates in creating and maintaining organisational culture through the perpetuation of behaviours and attitudes. However, governance/leadership roles are responsible for leading efforts to establish a positive and hopeful culture conducive to people's recovery.

  • Core principles

    Mental health services promote principles of hope, self-determination, personal agency, social inclusion and choice.A service environment supportive of people's recovery is one that sustains and communicates a culture of hope and optimism and actively encourages people's recovery efforts. The physical, social and cultural service environment inspires hope, optimism and humanistic practices for all who participate in service provision.

  • Key capabilities
     

    Mental health professionals

    Behaviours
    • actively uphold a culture of hope by using optimistic language, supporting people, their significant others and colleagues, and celebrating people's recovery efforts
    • understand and work to create the environment, conditions and practices that support people's recovery efforts
    Attitudes
    • sustain and express hope, optimism and the conviction that people can, will and do recover
    Skills
    • use hopeful recovery-oriented language in all interactions and documentation
    Knowledge
    • understand and effectively communicate recovery principles, emphasising hopefulness and optimism towards people's recovery
    • have knowledge of up-to-date research on recovery outcomes and can express this to colleagues, people accessing the service and their significant others
  • Good practice
    • Actively seek, celebrate and share (with permission) people's stories of recovery.
    • Emphasise achievements and successes, highlighting progress using affirmative language.
    • Note behaviours and events that signal improvements and remind people of these.
    • Sustain hope for people's recovery, especially when people feel unable to carry hope themselves.
    • Understand the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of recovery and its origin in the consumer movement.
    • Keep up to date with research on positive outcomes.
    • Recognise that team relationships impact on people's wellbeing.
    • When working with older people, celebrate life achievements and support people to retain their sense of personhood (such as through interests, hobbies, habits and preferences).
  • Good leadership
    • Provide avenues for people to gather and share their lived experience and stories of recovery (such as through monthly on-site gatherings).
    • Model recovery-oriented behaviours and language in case conferences and case reviews.
    • Foster a culture of high expectations of recovery and hope.
    • Celebrate rights of passage and achievements.
    • Recognise when a person has developed effective coping strategies for stressful situations.
    • Support people to become advocates or peer support workers, where appropriate.
    • Work to showcase mental health as an exciting area of innovation and positive outcomes in the broader health context.
    • Broadcast research on recovery outcomes and create opportunities for service-wide discussions of the research.
    • Use outcome-measures data to promote positive messages of recovery among staff and clients.
    • Ensure treatment and recovery planning involves routine conversations about people's aspirations and hopes.

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