Here is a brief summary of the key principles that you should apply in making sense of the results for the REC-CAP.
The overall principles of interpreting and acting on the REC-CAP profile are to:
- Reflect with the client on their goals and discuss how realistic they are and what is a viable timeline for achieving them
- Talk about how you will reconcile the summary results reported from the REC-CAP with their own personal goals and objectives
- Address acute barriers (barriers identified in traffic light system as red) to recovery – these are the things that will prevent the growth of strengths if they are not addressed
- Attend to chronic and unmet needs (but these should not stop the growth of strengths)
- The typical order of strength building is; Community, Social, and Personal. In other words, the aim would be to build social and external supports as the foundation for supporting the development of internal skills and capabilities – this is a social model of change and recovery
- Identify strengths to meet short-term goals – it is important to get some ‘quick wins’ that help to build the relationship and trust in the process
- Build relationships and community connections to meet longer-term goals – these will typically need to be broken down into realistic steps and the care planning process will help you to work through these in a systematic way
- Use strengths to build strengths
- Provide feedback and evaluate successes
We have provided you with two case studies – Wiley and Kevin and they will be our companions as we move forward to care planning in another course. For the moment, the key lessons from this module are that:
- The REC-CAP generates a simple visualization of scores that you need to be able to understand and explain back to the person in recovery
- To make the tasks simpler, the key domains are presented in a ‘traffic light’ format which means you can readily identify those things that are resources and assets (in green) and those domains that are barriers to recovery progress (in red)
- One of the key tasks is around how you reconcile what you discern from the scales (the shared aspects of recovery capital) and those that are specific to that individual (from the four open-text questions)
- Your discussion around what the REC-CAP summary means for the person in recovery creates the foundation for you to move the discussion toward creating a recovery care plan which we will discuss in the Recovery Care Planning Course