Background: Care planning is a multidisciplinary process used to develop an individualised recovery plan for each service user. The success of this process will depend on the extent to which members of mental health teams can work with one another, with service users, and with other service providers in developing a coordinated plan that meets service user needs across multiple domains.

Aims: This paper examined the teamworking challenges that Community Mental Health Teams (CMHTs) face during the care planning process and how such challenges may be managed.

Method: A narrative review of published articles and policy documents relevant to teamworking and recovery-focused care planning within mental health teams.

Findings: Teamworking challenges include the provision of integrated rather than fragmented care, the empowerment of the service user, and development of a distributed model of leadership, responsibility and decision making.

Conclusions: CMHTs face a range of substantial but manageable challenges in attempting to implement recovery-focused care planning. Recommendations include the need to integrate recovery-orientated skills and values into professional training, the need for greater multidisciplinary training opportunities, and the need to evaluate CMHTs based on recovery-orientated criteria.