Search results

In April 2010, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS trust won Regional Innovation Funding to recruit, train and employ six peer support workers in community mental health teams. At the time, practical examples of the employment of peer support workers were lacking in England. An earlier paper focuses on the lessons learned in this first year of peer support. The aim of this paper is to examine the nature and dynamics of peer support: what the peers did with clients and what difference this made.

The project was evaluated using a simple evaluation model reflecting service structure, processes and outcomes, collected through qualitative methods: documentary analysis, semi‐structured interviews and a focus group.

The six peers worked with 83 clients over the six month period. They offered emotional, practical, social support, support specific to care and support specific to recovery. They felt that the shared knowledge that they too had experienced mental health challenges was critical in engaging with clients in a trusting relationship and in informing their work.

In the absence of English service models for peer support workers, this paper provides some guidance for new peer support teams, and some evidence to support the helpful nature of peer support work.

Peer support work is increasingly becoming part of the delivery of health and social care services. However, in an Irish context, there is a paucity of research in this area. This study aims to investigate the experiences of peers and other key stakeholders across four sectors in Ireland.

Qualitative interviews (N = 35) were conducted with key respondents in mental health, substance use, migrant health and homelessness sectors. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and reported using an ecological framework.

Peer work is a slowly emerging area of practice, although mental health is further ahead in this journey. Findings suggest that peers are important additions to service delivery but also have various support and development needs. Organisations can encourage and support peers into employment through enacting human resource policy and practices, effective supervision, management and maintaining a positive working culture. Helping other professionals to understand the peer role and how it can function within the wider team is highlighted. National policy and governance structures can also support the emergence of the peer role, which exists in a highly complex arena.

Peers can play a meaningful role in supporting service users in four sectors of health and social care in Ireland. Structures and processes to help embed these roles into systems are encouraged across micro, meso and macro levels. Implications and limitations are discussed for moving forward with peer work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to include these four areas of practice simultaneously.

The employment of mental health consumers as peer support workers (PSWs) to provide support to other consumers is gaining momentum around the world. The purpose of this paper is to explore the tensions and dilemmas for a social worker in developing a peer support programme at an inpatient psychiatric service in Australia. The author draws on her experience of embedding a peer support programme providing an insight into the difficulties experienced and strategies used which supported the embedding of PSWs. The discipline of social work has complimentary values to the philosophy of peer support as well as the skills to manage the broad range of activities and tasks associated with developing a new programme. Due to the profession’s underlying knowledges and values social work is able to act as a bridge between mental health professionals such as doctors and nurses and PSWs giving social workers the ability to “interpret” the divergent languages, values, beliefs and practices.

A retrospective analysis of peer support programme implementation using social work values as a point of reference.

The author draws on her experience of embedding a peer support programme providing an insight into the difficulties experienced and strategies used which supported the embedding of PSWs. Due to the profession’s underlying knowledges and values social work is able to act as a bridge between mental health professionals such as doctors and nurses and PSWs giving social workers the ability to “interpret” the divergent languages, values, beliefs and practices.

This paper arose out of a conference presentation and author’s Master’s Dissertation, for which she received honours marks. During the period she was implementing the peer support programme, there was a dearth of local (Australian) literature about peer support programme development; this paper is a response to that need as the author would have greatly appreciated some local wisdom about embedding peer support programmes.

The authors believe this is a unique approach to a journal paper; certainly the authors have not discovered anything of its ilk previously. There is a lot of material available now about peer support, its benefits and challenges, and many are written by social work, psychology, psychiatric and nursing academics but without overt statement of the professional values which inform their practice.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on peer work and insights from Flourish Australia’s journey in growing a thriving peer workforce. Flourish Australia is a large not-for-profit organisation that has been supporting people with their recovery journeys for over 60 years. The organisation provides, predominantly, non-clinical community-based support to enable people who live with a mental health issue and/or psychosocial disabilities to lead contributing lives in their community.

Flourish Australia developed and implemented a number of strategic directives in order to support the growth of a peer workforce. Central to these directives were policy positions that encouraged a shared understanding of the value and contribution that people with a lived experience of a mental health issue add to an organisation. From this policy foundation, the Why Not a Peer Worker? strategy and Transformation Peer Worker strategy were implemented and embraced by hiring managers across the organisation.

The “Why Not a Peer Worker?” campaign, coupled with the Transformation Peer Worker strategy, resulted in an increase in Flourish Australia’s peer workforce of almost 600 per cent over an 18-month period to now number 145 positions.

This paper provides organisations who are seeking to develop or grow their peer workforce with practical ideas that have been successfully implemented by Flourish Australia that can be discussed and debated when developing a peer workforce.

This paper provides unique insights into Flourish Australia’s peer workforce journey.

In the previous chapters, I set out a conceptual model of trauma-informed servant leadership and discussed servant leadership supervision for working with burnout, compassion fatigue and secondary trauma in employees within trauma related health and social care settings. In this chapter, I further extend servant leadership to the peer support principle in trauma-informed approaches (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014). The first part of this chapter will examine peer support work (PSW) and report on the outcomes associated with it. Then, servant leadership will be discussed and used to operationalise the principle of peer support as set out in trauma-informed approaches. A servant leadership peer support approach is put forward with a theoretical basis. This theoretical model has been slightly changed from the previous servant leadership approaches discussed, in order to represent the PSW role more accurately. However, as discussed previously, it is not the characteristics of the Servant leadership (SL) model that define the approach, rather the philosophy and desire to serve first. In the last section of this chapter, Martha Griffin brings the characteristics of this model to life using her vast experience and discusses some of the potential challenges faced by peers in training and practice.

In April 2010, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS trust won Regional Innovation Funding to recruit, train and employ six peer support workers in community mental health teams. At the time, practical examples of the employment of peer support workers were lacking in England. The aim of this paper is to communicate the key lessons learned in this first year of peer support in the hope that these will provide a foundation for other services to build upon.

The project was evaluated using a simple evaluation model reflecting service structure, processes and outcomes, collected through qualitative methods: documentary analysis, semi‐structured interviews and a focus group.

The peer support employment process has been broken down into its fundamental components (selection, recruitment, training, supervision relationships, recovery approach and discharge of clients) and within each of these sections a brief narrative is provided to explain some of the challenges faced. Each section ends with recommendations based on the lessons learned as a result of the pilot study.

A second paper will examine the nature of peer support: what the peers did with clients and what difference this made.

At present many mental health services are planning to employ peer support workers and this paper provides some early guidance for implementing this process in the NHS.

The purpose of this study is to describe peer support work in a men’s mental health unit from a lived experience and service user’s perspective. The intertwining of process (a lived experience perspective) and subject (the therapeutic value of peer support) leads to greater knowledge and insight into peer support for people with mental health problems.

This service user narrative draws on the extracts from a reflective journal of interactions and conversations with people with mental health problems as well as feedback from service users and staff about the value of peer support. These methods allow a first-person, service user’s, reflective and narrative account of peer support work.

Peer support work, particularly hearing voices sessions, are found to be highly therapeutic and worthwhile. They promote insight and create feelings of safety and hope in what can sometimes be a frightening and hostile ward environment. Peer support provides emotional and practical support. Sharing stories and experiences of mental illness with people leads to trust, feelings of being valued, heard and accepted as well as better experiences of care and being seen as a person first. Due to their shared experiences, peer support workers are able to befriend people with mental health problems on the ward. Peer support work bridges the gap and vacuum of care between people with mental health problems and staff. It compensates for understaffing to provide more holistic and person-centred care and support.

Lived experience/ service user perspectives and narratives on peer support are rare, particularly in a hospital setting. This article provides a rich, perhaps overlooked and hidden narrative on the nature of peer support work. People with mental health problems, like Ben, are often excluded from society, health and social care, education, employment and research. This narrative opens up a pathway to understanding peer support from a service user perspective.

This paper aims to provide a summary of where peer support currently sits in the UK mental health services policy and practice. It presents an overview of models of peer support; the UK national policy on peer support; evidence of the benefits of peer support; case studies of recent and continuing peer support in action; challenges facing peer support; and suggestions for developing peer support in the future.

The paper selects and discusses evidence from academic literature and policy and practice on peer support within the UK.

The evidence base demonstrating the benefits of peer support in mental health across the UK is increasing. This has persuaded UK governmental bodies to encourage the development of peer support services, of which there is a number of models and examples, although the current economic climate poses challenges to their development.

Historically, peer support in mental health services across the UK has developed piecemeal. But at a time when policy-makers, health practitioners and people who use mental health services are increasingly recognising the benefits of peer support, this paper draws key evidence together and provides pointers towards the future development of such services.

This article describes the development of peer support roles and programmes in Scotland, and includes findings from an evaluation of a peer support worker pilot scheme. The evaluation assessed the impact of the pilot on service users, peer support workers and the wider service system, along with considering the issues involved in implementing peer support programmes.

The purpose of this study was to identify and understand the barriers and enablers to the implementation of youth peer support in a clinical mental health service. The development of a lived experience workforce in mental health is a key component of policy at both the state and the federal level in Australia. Implementing a peer workforce within existing clinical services, however, can be a challenging task. Furthermore, implementing peer support in a youth mental health setting involves a further degree of complexity, involving a degree of care for young people being invited to provide peer support when they may be still early in their own recovery journey.

This paper reports on a formative evaluation of the beginning stages of implementation of a youth peer workforce within an existing clinical mental health service in Melbourne.

The project found that it was feasible and beneficial to implement youth peer support; however, significant challenges remain, including lack of appropriate training for young people, uncertainty amongst clinical staff about the boundaries of the peer role and the potential for “tokenism” in the face of slow cultural change across the whole service.

Very little evaluation has yet been undertaken into the effectiveness of implementing peer support in youth mental health services. This paper offers an opportunity to investigate where services may need to identify strengths and address difficulties when undertaking future implementation efforts.