Supporting personal recovery has become the main aim for mental health services in many countries nowadays. In particular, the relationship between individual service users and staff members can be the key issue in supporting recovery and this requires specific measures in order to identify and evaluate the orientation of services in this process of change. INSPIRE is a standardized questionnaire developed by King's College, London that represents a service user-rated measure of staff support for personal recovery in the UK.

Although there is a number of instruments aimed at monitoring recovery in the clinical and functional features, there is still lack of measures for personal recovery and recovery orientation of services in the Italian background.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of INSPIRE as it is applied in the Italian mental health services.

Two rounds of data were collected from a sample of 79 inpatients and outpatients of rehabilitation centers and consultant service of the municipality of Ravenna. Analysis was undertaken using SPSS. The main issues investigated were internal consistency, test-retest reliability and exploratory factor analysis.

The results in the present studies indicate that the Italian version of the INSPIRE measure had a very good internal consistency and a satisfactory test-retest reliability.

While further studies testing the instrument in larger and more diverse clinical contexts are needed, INSPIRE can be considered a relevant and feasible instrument to use in supporting the development of a recovery-oriented system in Italy.