STaRS

Maximising people’s recovery from mental health through intensive evidence-based interventions.

The Team

STaRS aims to maximise people’s recovery from mental health through intensive evidence based interventions in people’s homes, placements and local communities. They work to support and restore people to their optimal physical, cognitive, psychological and social functioning. STaRS provides a multi-disciplinary approach; promoting recovery for individuals with complex and enduring mental health difficulties who may have previously had an inpatient rehabilitation admission.

Alongside the inpatient unit at Townend Court, STaRS Community operates 7 days a week, 8am-8pm. Both services offer an MDT assessment, followed by a biopsychosocial formulation, which informs individualised recovery work. Furthermore, STaRS offers training and consultation to service users, their friends, family and other agencies involved in the care.

The Psychologically Informed Environments (PIE) model underpins the service ethos. PIE has at its core, safe and secure relationships and environments for staff and service users, delivered through training, supervision, and regular evaluation using the ReQol and Recovery Star tools. Compassion Focused Therapy is the psychological framework adopted by STaRS which is cited as being “the sensitivity to suffering in self and others, combined with the commitment to try and alleviate and prevent it”.

The STaRS work to their team values identified below:

Open
Trustworthy
Honest
Empathic
Respectful

The Royal College of Psychiatry’s 2009 publication “Enabling recovery for people with complex mental health needs: A template for rehabilitation services” offers the following objective for a recovery service:

“The purpose of specialist recovery services is to deliver effective rehabilitation to people whose needs cannot be met by less intensive mainstream adult mental health services. The focus is on the treatment and care of people with severe and complex mental health problems who are disabled and often distressed, and who are or would otherwise be high users of in-patient and community services. The aim is to promote personal recovery, ‘whilst accepting and accounting for continuing difficulty and disability.”