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Developing Industry Support Standards for Peer Workers Living with HIV
PracticesPeople living with HIVBC
Summary
The need for an "industry standard" when it comes to supporting and employing people living with HIV doing meaningful peer work has come directly from people living with HIV. Peer workers have expressed in detail a number of concerns and inadequacies when it comes to supports systems currently in practice.
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Key Findings
Key findings related to emerging/promising practices for engaging PWLLE:
- Visible identifiers of peers such as name badges that say “peer” require a certain level of outness from the worker. Safety, and confidentiality should be considered.
- Changing hats from “volunteer to worker” also affects the peers’ social and support networks (changing relationships between client and peer support worker, for example) and should be taken into account.
- Peers should be given the agency to set boundaries, say no, and work within their comfort level.
- Be mindful of triggers and periods of burnout experienced by peers, to try to avoid.
- Peers identified a number of areas where additional training would be useful (such as population-specific training, mental health education, professional boundaries, etc.)
- Have multiple opportunities for evaluation throughout the project/employment.
