Nearly £400,000 has been awarded to a project which sees people who have lived with mental health and substance misuse issues use their own experience to help others get onto the road to recovery.
The grant of £398,000 from the Health Foundation will enable the Peer Support Worker initiative to run in Nottinghamshire for three years from 2011.
The project will employ people who have experienced mental health problems, either themselves or as a carer, to use their experiences, coping strategies and community connections in a mutually supportive relationship with peers. It aims to inspire hope, promote recovery and challenge discrimination and is built on the belief that people who experience mental health problems can embody recovery and challenge other’s expectations.
The prospective workers will receive training from Nottingham organisation Making Waves, working with trainers from the Institute of Mental Health (IMH), through an accredited, dedicated ten week course that includes topics such as listening skills, ethics and boundaries and team working.
Those people successfully selected to become peer support workers will be employed by Nottinghamshire Healthcare and will complement the Trust’s mental health workers with their own insight, experience and suggestions. The project is mutually beneficial giving the peer support workers the opportunity to get into employment while gaining reward and fulfilment serving as role models and sources of support to others.
The project is led by Julie Repper, Recovery Lead, Nottinghamshire Healthcare. She said: “We are delighted to have received this funding. We are leading the way in national community practice in peer support – this truly is cutting edge and it is great that we can now provide this service across Nottinghamshire. The project will have a dedicated manager and be fully evaluated to ensure it can be refined and sustained effectively.
“This project is very much a partnership effort and would not exist without the collaboration of everyone involved including IMH, Making Waves, social services, Advocacy Alliance, and The Carers Federation. This is ‘Big Society Thinking’. It’s all about empowering and skilling up people and ensuring they have more of a voice in the community.”
Initially there will be seven peer support worker posts but it is hoped to increase this in future. The project has been informed by the successful implementation of peer support workers in Nottingham City which began its pilot in April this year. All of the workers originally employed in these posts have since progressed into permanent positions.
“We expect the project to produce powerful change,” Julie explains. “For the peer support workers, the post will improve their employability and also progress their recovery by helping them develop self-belief, hope and better social networks, and by raising their economic well-being, which has impacts at many levels. For individual service users and their carers, it will increase self-belief, hope and empowerment, improve their social networks, help them develop coping strategies, and will hopefully reduce their use of mental health services.”
The project was one of 160 applicants for the Health Foundation’s Closing the Gap funding. Closing the Gap monies go to projects that aim to change the relationship between people and health services.
