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 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.

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.

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.

This briefing paper examines the role of advocacy in empowering people to express their views and preferences and also their understanding of the meaning of mental distress. It provides an overview of the different types of advocacy, and the situations in which advocacy might be particularly important. It also addresses some of the misunderstandings surrounding the concept of advocacy.

This paper finds that recovery for people in forensic services is in most ways the same as for those using other mental health services. Hope for the future, control over your life and illness, andopportunity for a life beyond illness are key for both. But people with offending histories also have to come to terms with what they have done. Forensic services can help them to recover by supporting them to ‘come to terms with themselves’.

This paper argues that risk and safety are rightly major concerns in mental health care but that traditional methods of assessing risk have stood in the way of helping people to recover their lives. It argues that jointly produced ‘safety plans’ can be more effective ways of managing risk as well as enabling people to get on with their lives.

The development of mental health services which will support the recovery of those using them, their families, friends and carers is now a central theme in national and international policy (DH/HMG, 2011; Slade, 2009). In order to support these developments we need clear, empiricallyinformed statements of what constitutes high-quality services and how these will lead to key recovery outcomes. This is what the present paper aims to do.

Peer support is based on offering and receiving help based on shared understanding, respect and mutual empowerment. Whether paid or voluntary and working in statutory, private or independent services, peer support workershave a valuable role to play. The introduction of people with lived experience of mental health problems into the mental health workforce is a hugely significant step in a service becoming more recovery focused. This paper sets out four phases for an organisation looking to introduce peer worker posts: preparation; recruitment; employment; and ongoing development.

This paper shows how Team Recovery Implementation Plans, known as TRIPs, support a whole team in becoming more recovery-focused, but should not be seen as a management device. A TRIP aims to empower teams to translate recovery ideas into practice and to utilise the skills and resources of everyone at the front line, both those providing and those using services, to develop innovative ways of promoting recovery and recovery environments.