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Service user, consumer and peer workforce: A guide for managers and employers

PoliciesPrinciplesPracticesPeople who use drugsPeople living with HIVMental health consumersInternational

Summary

This guide aims to make sense of this and provides some general guidelines to ensure organisations and the community they serve have the benefit of effective supervision. It provides information about how to set up, review and evaluate a structured supervision process, and overviews the different requirements of the different professions that may be part of a team. The guide brings recommendations, guidelines and templates together in one place to make sense of the diverse types of supervision and professional requirements.

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Key Findings

The service user, consumer and peer workforce is a diverse and rapidly growing workforce in today’s mental health and addiction services in New Zealand. It includes all roles that require lived experience for example consumer advisors and peer support workers.
This guide has been written for mental health and addiction services that employ workers in identified lived experience roles. It is designed to be used in conjunction with the Competencies for the mental health and addiction consumer, service user and peer workforce, available from www.tepou.co.nz.

Key findings related to emerging/promising principles for engaging PWLLE:

  • Mutuality – the authentic two-way relationships between people through ‘the kinship of common experience.’
  • Experiential knowledge – the learning, knowledge and wisdom that comes from personal lived experience of mental distress or addiction and recovery.
  • Self-determination – the right for people to make free choices about their life and to be free from coercion on the basis of their mental distress or addiction.
  • Participation – the right for people to participate and lead in mental health and/or addiction services including in the development or running of services as well as in their own treatment and recovery.
  • Equity – the right of people who experience mental distress and/or addiction to have fair and equal opportunities to other citizens and to be free of discrimination.
  • Recovery and hope – the belief that there is always hope and that resiliency and meaningful recovery is possible for everyone.

Key findings related to emerging/promising practices for engaging PWLLE:

Recruitment

  • Selection Processes – Face-to-face selection, more than just interviews – role plays, presentation on applicant’s story, group exercises with all applicants
  • Job descriptions – Add detail about tasks required and the settings expected to work in as well

Work Conditions

  • The usual practice is that employees do not use the mental health or addiction service they are employed by to avoid role confusion. Create a negotiation strategy on case by case basis
  • Peer workers should be allowed to share or not share aspects or details about their lived experience (up to their discretion). If told a manager or colleague it should be kept confidential unless otherwise told.

Orientation and Training

  • Training should precede active duties or coincide with start of employment
  • Preparation and training for non-peer colleagues should be employed to ensure appropriate culture change. Dialogue should be created between peer workers and non-peer workers. Content of training includes:
    definitions of peer work; origins and development of peer work; values of peer work; the benefits and evidence base for peer work; peer perspectives in boundaries; viewing addiction, mental distress, services and interventions through a peer lens; identifying and eliminating stigma and discrimination in the workplace; providing space to ‘unpack’ any difficulties staff may have with peer colleagues.

Line Management and Supervision – Peer workers should be line managed by other peer workers

Key Findings Related to Implementation Approaches:

The effectiveness, relevance and feasibility of workforce development needs to be evaluated regularly and reported on for fine tuning of workforce strategy and service delivery.

  • People who use the service and peer workers need to be viewed as two distinct groups whose interests may differ at times. Peer workers have the same obligation as other staff to listen and respond to the views of the people who use the service.
  • Feedback or qualitative evaluation of the peer service should be incorporated in the quality processes of the organization. Feedback from a variety of direct and indirect sources can be used to develop and improve the peer service and performance of the peer staff.