Recovery Star 4th Edition
Recovery Star 4th Edition overview
Creator and Context
The Recovery Star is a collaborative keywork and outcome tool for mental health and wellbeing, part of the Outcomes Star family.
It was created by Joy MacKeith and Sara Burns with Sandra Greaves, and is published by Triangle Consulting Social Enterprise. The 4th edition was published in 2019.
It is a licensed instrument. Triangle requires organisations to hold a licence and to train every worker who uses it, and prohibits derivative works.
Presenting Conditions
The Recovery Star covers ten outcome areas:
Managing mental health
Physical health
Living skills
Friends and community
Use of time
Relationships
Addictive behaviour
Home
Identity and self esteem
Trust and hope
Administration
Completed collaboratively by the worker and the person supported, as part of ordinary keywork rather than as a questionnaire. It can be completed across more than one session.
Each area is rated on a 1 to 10 ladder, anchored to a five stage Journey of Change: stuck (1 to 2), accepting help (3 to 4), believing and trying (5 to 6), learning (7 to 8) and self reliance (9 to 10).
Desired Audience
Adults with a wide range of short and long term mental health difficulties, in keywork and support services. Recovery here means living well with mental health issues, not the absence of symptoms. The 4th edition notes explicitly that self reliance in every area is not always an appropriate goal.
The Recovery Star is a conversation with a structure, not a questionnaire with a score. Its value is in what the worker and the person work out together while completing it, and in the visual shape of the star, which people can see and understand at a glance.
Considerations
Triangle recommends against computing a total or an average. Readings should be considered at outcome area level.
There are no clinical bands or cut off scores.
The only independent peer reviewed study (Killaspy et al., 2012, on the earlier edition) found good test retest reliability but inadequate inter rater reliability, and concluded that it cannot be recommended as a routine clinical outcome tool, though it may facilitate collaborative care planning.
The 4th edition validation is publisher run and has no external convergent validation.
A licence and mandatory worker training are required. Deploying it in software does not remove that obligation from the customer.
How to score the Recovery Star 4th Edition
Conducting the assessment
The worker and the person agree a rating from 1 to 10 for each of the ten areas, against the Journey of Change descriptors.
Interpretation
Each area scores 1 to 10 and is plotted on a star chart.
There is no total score and no severity bands. Interpretation is at the level of the individual outcome area, read in two ways: which stage of the Journey of Change each area sits in, and how far the person has moved between readings.
Triangle explicitly advises against averaging or totalling the areas.
Clinical Considerations
Read the shape, not a number. A star that is strong on home and living skills but flat on trust and hope tells you where the work is.
Do not present it as a validated clinical outcome measure. The independent evidence does not support that.
Use it for what it is good at: a shared, visual, collaborative plan the person actually recognises as theirs.
Recovery Star 4th Edition use cases
Collaborative care planning in mental health support services
Structuring keywork conversations around ten life areas
Recording distance travelled across a support relationship
Service level reporting on recovery focused outcomes
Category
General Well-being
Research Summary
Killaspy, H., White, S., Taylor, T. L., & King, M. (2012). Psychometric properties of the Mental Health Recovery Star. British Journal of Psychiatry, 201(1), 65 to 70.
MacKeith, J. (2014). Assessing the reliability of the Outcomes Star in research and practice. Housing, Care and Support, 17(4), 188 to 197.
Good, A. (2022). Outcomes Star Psychometric Factsheet: Recovery Star 4th edition. Brighton: Triangle Consulting Social Enterprise.
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Note on Assessment licensing
Some assessments are copyright protected and require a licence or the copyright holder's permission for clinical, commercial or digital use. Where that applies, obtaining and maintaining that permission is the responsibility of the practice or organisation using the assessment. Tacklit provides the digital administration, scoring and reporting. We do not grant, transfer or supply rights to the underlying instrument.
