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Peers in the Workforce: Reversing Misconceptions and Succeeding
This article is part of a quarterly series giving voice to the perspectives of individuals with lived experiences as they share their opinions on a particular topic. The authors of this column facilitated a focus group of their peers to inform this writing. The authors are served by Services for...
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Peers: An Essential Component to the Behavioral Health Workforce
What makes a well-rounded behavioral health workforce who can deliver innovative, person-centered services that can affect change for the better? For Federation, the answer is Peer Specialists. Peers have become an integral part of the behavioral health workforce and Federation has been a pioneer...
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Organizational Needs-Based Toolkit for Peer Workforce Integration Introduced at NYC Peer Workforce Consortium
On Thursday, April 18th, the NYC Peer and Community Health Worker Workforce Consortium convened over sixty stakeholders at CUNY Graduate School for Public Health for an event to “kick off” its new toolkit. The toolkit offers guidance to provider organizations who are interested in advancing the...
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Integrating the Social and Cultural Determinants of Health into Peer Advocates Training
The phrase social and cultural determinants of health has entered the lexicon of medical and social service providers and is often mentioned alongside health disparities. Since the early 90s, public health researchers have been suggesting that a person’s socioeconomic characteristics, including...
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Adding Recovery Professionals to the Continuum of Care
What is the purpose of our work, of all the prevention, intervention and therapy, all that merciful medical model and multi-volume DSM? The treatment plans? Aftercare? All this helping apparatus – what’s it for? Now, the agreed response is that “recovery” is our mutual goal irrespective...
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Enhanced CRPA and CHW Training and Workforce Transformation
The Certified Recovery Peer Advocate (CRPA) and Community Health Worker (CHW) are two emerging workforce roles in health care. A CRPA is a person who uses lived experience with substance use disorder (SUD) and who have been certified to provide peer support services including non-clinical coaching,...
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Supporting Peer Specialists
An increasingly common workforce issue is preparing “traditional” providers for working beside peer providers, that is, individuals with the lived experience of mental health issues. SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) defines a peer provider as “a person who...
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MHA Vet2Vet Program: Leading the Way in Peer Support
Mental Health Association in Orange County, Inc. (MHA) is pleased to provide Orange County’s only Vet2Vet Peer Networking Program, also known as the PFC Joseph P. Dwyer Peer Support Project. The program is named in honor of Private First Class Joseph P. Dwyer, an Army Medic who served in Iraq,...
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Whole Health Peer Support: Improving Health Disparity Among Individuals with Serious Mental Health Challenges and/or Addictions
Recovery Innovations is one of the largest employers of peer support providers in the world. Our peer workforce is about 600 strong and counting. Back in 2000, we began to identify significant vulnerability in the health of our workforce as well as the health of the people they were serving....
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From Isolation and Despair to Engagement and Activation: The Peer Support Specialist’s Role in the Behavioral Health Care System
Peer coaches are individuals in recovery from a behavioral health condition who are trained to use their lived experience to help others on their journey to recovery. They do this by offering support, promoting engagement and facilitating activation. Optum’s Whole Health Peer coaching program is...
