Inspired by Imroc’s transformative event, Peer Support: Visions of Opportunity for 2030, this report explores the future of peer support through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. With insights from 180 passionate participants, it delves into strategies for expanding peer support, the potential for an oversight body, and how organisations can meaningfully support Peer Support Workers (PSWs). Through diverse voices, this reflection captures the complex journey toward a more inclusive and effective peer support movement.

This paper responds to the growing number of lived experience roles that are developing in health and social care in the UK and other countries. In these roles, relevant lived experience is used skilfully to inform and add value to how services operate, from frontline to leadership levels. The inclusion of lived experience roles into health and social care systems reflects a wider transformation in how we understand and respond to a range of human experiences and social challenges.

This briefing paper seeks to bring together this collective knowledge. We will focus on the supervision that is provided to peer workers, which might be offered by senior peer workers, or by their non-peer line managers. Alongside this we will make a case for the importance of tailored supervision for peer workers, provide some examples of where supervision has been particularly successful, and explore what peer workers and their supervisors (peer and non-peer) need in order to succeed.

This Tool was created by people who have first hand experience with acute care wards — whether as staff, patients, or supporting loved ones. It’s based on wellness recovery action planning and aims to provide a practical tool for those working on or staying in Acute care wards.

Living with a health condition can be difficult. It can affect how you feel and what you can do. This toolkit is a personal record of the things that you can do to keep yourself well and live the life you want to lead, discovering what is possible. No two people are the same. This toolkit is for you to use for your own personal situation. It is designed to support you to discover a new normal to maintain a fulling and happy life.

This briefing paper has been co-produced by people who have experience of admission to acute inpatient wards (including people diagnosed with mental health challenges, complex trauma issues and neurodivergent/autistic people), family members and mental health practitioners from a variety of professional backgrounds (including nursing, psychiatry, psychology and occupational therapy).

Throughout my career working in mental health services I have seen how helpful creative activity can be in supporting people (including myself) to stay well. These activities provide a sense of peace, creativity, purpose, achievement and connection for people who have lost confidence and a purpose and meaning in life. As CEO of South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust our mission, informed and co-produced by local people, was to help people realise their potential and live well in their own communities.

The Peer Support Worker role is one of the most exciting new roles that are being deployed across England as part of the Long Term Plan. Both employed and voluntary Peer Support Workers are now found in most adult mental health teams across the country and Health Education England continues to fund an accessible and effective training programme that Imroc along with others is delivering.

This paper seeks to outline the progress that has been made in peer support in recent years, as well as to present a vision for a future of peer support within services which lays out the conditions needed for it to thrive.

Across UK mental health services, most NHS Trusts and voluntary sector services are actively recruiting people with personal experience of mental health challenges to newly created ‘Peer Support Worker’ positions. A national competency framework for peer workers has been agreed (Health Education England, 2020) and accompanying training programmes have been established (see for example, Bradstreet, 2006; Repper et al, 2013 a & b).

If services are to become more recovery focused then recovery principles and values must permeate every facet of organisations (Shepherd et al 2009). Creating recovery focused services is not about adding a new intervention or service to our repertoire but about fundamental cultural change.

Whilst most peer support practice, research and publications have focused on peer support by and for people with mental health problems, informal support between people who have shared experiences has always occurred across the whole spectrum of health and social care settings.

This is the second paper in the ‘Sharing our Experience’ series that is designed to explore different facets of Recovery Colleges and how the principles on which they are based (see Perkins et al, 2018) are realised in different contexts. In the first paper in this ‘Sharing Our Experience’ series, colleagues from the Recovery College within the Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences in Canada provided insights into the creative and thoughtful ways in which the core principles of a Recovery College were realised in practice in a largely clinical mental health service as a core part of a broader ‘Recovery Action Plan’.

Since the idea of ‘Recovery Colleges’ was first introduced in 2006/7, they have been taken up widely both across the UK and in many other parts of the world. Increasingly Recovery Colleges form a core part of recovery focused mental health services: they both embody the recovery-focused transformation of services and drive broader organisational change across services.

Peer support is more than the employment of people with lived experience in paid support roles; it is the employment of people who share some of the experiences of people using services (peers) specifically to draw on these shared experiences and ways they have found to live well (their experiential knowledge) – to provide support based on shared understandings, mutual problem solving, a belief in the possibility of recovery, and time together to find hope, solutions and connections.

The Live Well model brings together best evidence for community development, social prescribing, health coaching, health education and volunteering – all linked and developed through a core coproduction forum. This paper describes the development and outcomes of the pioneer Live Well service – Let’s Live Well in Rushcliffe (LLWiR).

Within the current climate of resource restrictions and pressured workloads, recovery colleges demonstrate the value of coproduction and self-management. Recovery Colleges 10 Years On reminds us of the pace of change, impact and ever growing evidence base for recovery colleges within the UK and internationally.

The evidence base for Recovery offers achievable answers to the resource restrictions and system pressures that mental health providers, commissioners and others in the system are facing on a daily basis. Co-authored by Institute of Mental Health, London School of Economics and ImROC, Recovery: the business case is an outcome analysis and economic review of Recovery.

Coproduction is a term we frequently hear and use. If we stop to examine the way we work in every interaction and every conversation, do we truly recognise everyone’s assets, engage in mutually respectful and beneficial relationships and actively endeavour to reduce traditional power imbalances?

Receiving a diagnosis of dementia can have an overwhelming impact. The paper sets out a framework for understanding the personal journey of recovery with a diagnosis of dementia; from identity, impact of diagnosis, making sense of their experience to coping strategies and ways to live well.