More and more the recovery orientation is becoming a quality marker of psychiatric services. At the Department of Psychiatry at Klinikum Bremerhaven we have tried to measure the effect of our efforts to improve the recovery attitudes of the staff.

During the last two years nearly all staff members participated in three training courses each with 6 hours focusing on different aspects of recovery (top down approach). Furthermore we have included more peer providers as “recovery companions” (2012: n=3, 2014: n=7) in all areas of our department (bottom up approach).

To measure the effect of these activities we have translated the Recovery Self Assessment (RSA) Questionnaire into German. The staff members were then asked to fill in our German version of the RSA in May 2012 (T1) and March 2014 (T2).

60 (T1) respectively 65 (T2) questionnaires could be evaluated. As presented in the table RSA total score and the scores of all five RSA factors improved.

These results and some findings on the single item level that seem to be important against the background of the specific features of the German health system will be presented in detail. Our preliminary results point out that our bidirectional approach may be appropriate to improve the recovery orientation of psychiatric services. The implications for our future policy will be presented.