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The purpose of this paper is to review the role of values within contemporary mental health recovery services, outlining the rationale and approach for a specific values-focused staff intervention to promote autonomously motivated uptake of recovery-oriented practices.

Recent advances in understanding of the enduring gap between ideological and applied acceptance of personal recovery within mental health services are outlined, with particular focus on the limited utility of training programmes as a means to promoting implementation. Frequently, mental health service organisations have adopted recovery policies in a primarily “top-down” fashion standing in contrast to the high autonomy approaches espoused for service users. Drawing from the extensive research related to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a complementary focus on “bottom-up” approaches that enable service-delivery staff to develop a sense of autonomy for changed work practices in order to increase implementation is indicated.

Application of values-focused interventions for mental health recovery staff parallel to the approaches acknowledged as effective for service participants are likely to be effective in promoting implementation of newly trained recovery-oriented practices.

The paper is conceptual in nature and therefore reflects the priorities and views of the authors but the paper draws together well-established literature to develop a novel approach to a highly relevant issue.

Training transfer and implementation of evidence-based practice are issues with broad relevance and the explication of additional methods to promote employee uptake of new practices is a key priority for organisations and policy makers.

Significant social implications include furthering the discussion and insight to the development of effective delivery of mental health services to individuals accessing service.

A novel aspect of this paper is the provision of a theoretical rationale for the application of SDT as a framework for understanding the continuing challenge of recovery operationalisation, which despite the conceptual good-fit, currently stands as an association not well exploited. Moreover, this paper proposes values-clarification and coaching as a specific and reproducible approach to enhancing recovery-oriented service provision.

The authors describe a hypothetical course that educators can use as a resource and model to (1) inform students about the transformations currently occurring as societies grounded in practices of the 20th century Industrial Age experiment with the emergent systems and structures of the 21st century Innovation Age, (2) identify experiential learning strategies that actively engage students in practicing the collaboration skills they will need to be successful, and (3) expose students to the field of positive psychology to understand their psychological strengths and to learn how to use them strategically to enjoy more success across multiple social networks. These multiple social networks present a complexity to learners that require students to develop a navigational compass. Psychological strengths refer to personality traits and competencies that enable people to do things well. In this three module course, students learn how moments of positive emotion can contribute to the high levels of engagement that occur when operating from strengths. Awareness and use of strengths energize the drive for achievement, sustain resilience, and improve performance. Students systematically identify their strengths and learn to spot strengths in others. In portfolios, they document engaged experiences to understand what truly energizes them and improves productivity. They reflect on how strengths and moments of positive emotion affect their self-esteem and self-efficacy. In class activities, students explore how to deploy strengths effectively in different settings. In the last module, they set goals and work with teams to discover why collaboration and communication are essential to maximizing the value of strengths-based learning in social networks.

The purpose of this paper is to review the available evidence regarding the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of Recovery Colleges. To make suggestions for future research.

Selective review of relevant published studies, including reports in the “grey” literature.

Despite methodological limitations, it has been consistently found that attendance at Recovery Colleges is perceived to be useful and to help people progress towards their recovery goals. There is some evidence of reductions in service use (and therefore costs). In addition, there is evidence of beneficial effects for peer trainers and possible positive impact on staff attitudes.

The existing research highlights the need for further robust studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, to understand better the overall impact of Recovery Colleges and the underlying mechanisms of change.

There is a need for further studies of the relationship between the “key defining features” and outcomes. This means the collection and pooling of systematic, “practice-based” evidence.

The introduction of an explicitly recovery educational (“learning”) model into mainstream mental health services seems to have a profound effect on reducing the power differences inherent in traditional professional/patient relationships. If this can be replicated across organisations it could facilitate the kind of fundamental cultural change necessary to give back recovery to the people who have always owned it.

The information collected together in this paper is already publicly available, however it is difficult to find. The analysis and interpretation is original.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of mindfulness on organizational role stress (ORS) based on the Monitor Acceptance Theory (MAT) perspective.

This study is based on a cross-sectional data analysis collected from 137 employees working at an Indian IT organization located in Bangalore (India). ORS and MAAS scales have been used for measuring ORS and mindfulness, respectively.

Overall, the study findings have indicated a negative relationship (r = −0.588) between mindfulness (M) and ORS. First, both personal inadequacy (PI) and self-role distance (SRD) are found to be predominantly impacted by M, whereas both role erosion (RE) and role overload (RO) appear to be less affected by mindfulness. Second, SRD appears to be the highest ORS sub-dimension among IT employees. Third, building on the extant literature, it can be inferred that “no one size fits all”, ORS is both organization and context specific.

This study pioneers to establish empirical evidence between M and ORS. Training employees on M can help in effectively handling ORS.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review on evidence-based intervention concerning the reduction of stress/burnout and the improvement of wellbeing for professionals working with people with intellectual disabilities (IDs).

Theoretical models and literature related to stress reduction are reviewed from a classical cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) approach up to the novel contribution of the third generation of cognitive-behavioural therapies, with a specific focus on contextual behavioural sciences and acceptance and commitment Therapy (ACT).

Despite the improvement of CBT-based interventions in reducing risk factors for stress and burnout, the limitations of a problem-solving approach when applied to challenging environments like those of direct support to persons with ID, are still large. Interventions based on the core processes and the related techniques of ACT appear to be promising in promoting the well being of paid carers reducing the risk of burnout, and increasing psychological flexibility. Such factors can increase the ability to clarify personal and professional values, as well as the opportunities to act consistently with such values and achieve greater social reinforcement in the work environment.

The limitations of the existing research are presented and discussed. There are several aspects that future research should address in order to promote staff training protocols that could be extensively applied with preventive aims. Organisations could take the available procedures and methodologies and implement these evidence-based practices within existing training.

The research on the application of ACT and third generation of behavioural approaches to the wellbeing and behaviour of staff supporting persons with IDs remains limited. The present paper is the first narrative review on this topic.

The purpose of this research paper is to apply the Six Sigma methodology to identify the attributes of a lecturer that will help improve a student’s prior knowledge of a discipline from an initial “x” per cent knowledge to a higher “y” per cent of knowledge.

The data collection method involved a one-on-one, in-depth interview based on the Kano questionnaire with a sample of 170 undergraduate and graduate students aged between 25 and 40 years in two Ghanaian universities. The Kano questionnaire contained the critical to quality (CTQ) and the 25 functional requirements (FRs). The analytical Kano (A-Kano) questionnaire was adopted for the purpose of improving learning outcome with a student–lecturer interaction. The CTQs in this study, from the customer (student) perspective, will correspond to Bloom’s (1956) categories in the cognitive domain made up of remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. The configuration index, which provides a decision factor for selecting the 25 FRs that contribute to improving learning outcome made up of the American Society of Quality’s six leadership competencies (navigator, communicator, mentor, learner, builder and motivator) and 19 attributes from previous research studies on service quality in higher education. This study used the varimax and quartimax factor analysis rotation methods to generate the principal components (PCs).

Out of the 25 FRs, four (communicator, mentor, builder and motivator) of the American Society of Quality (ASQ) leadership competencies were found to be exciters or attractive and when applied by the lecturer would exceed customer (student) expectation.

The study involved only a judgment sample of 170 undergraduate and graduate students from two universities drawn in Accra, Ghana; hence, the outcome cannot be generalized to the entire student population in Ghana as a whole.

The Kano results from this study corroborates with previous findings that students perceive “Fostering of Team Work”, “Expertise in Other Subject Areas”, “Variety of Teaching Methods”, “Friendliness” and “Humor” as either exciters or attractive attributes.

Some of the benefits from this study include the fact that lecturers may improve classroom experience knowing what their students regard as satisfactory and dissatisfactory attributes or they may have a better understanding of the student’s perspective. The concept of student satisfaction addressed in this study should therefore always be seen as a “means to an end”, with the end being the transformation of students.

This study contributes to the literature by examining how the student’s approach to learning or acquiring new knowledge has a significant effect on the learning outcome using factor analysis rotation methods to generate the PCs.