Implementing peer support into practice in mental health services: a qualitative comparative case study.

Background: Peer workers are people with personal experience of mental distress, employed within mental health services to support others with similar experiences. Research has identified a range of factors that might facilitate or hinder the introduction of new peer worker roles into mental health services. While there is mixed evidence for the effectiveness of peer worker delivered interventions, there are no studies exploring how implementation might be associated with effect.

The impact of working as a peer worker in mental health services: a longitudinal mixed methods study.

Background: Peer workers are increasingly employed in mental health services to use their own experiences of mental distress in supporting others with similar experiences. While evidence is emerging of the benefits of peer support for people using services, the impact on peer workers is less clear. There is a lack of research that takes a longitudinal approach to exploring impact on both employment outcomes for peer workers, and their experiences of working in the peer worker role.

Peer support for discharge from inpatient mental health care versus care as usual in England (ENRICH): a parallel, two-group, individually randomised controlled trial.

Background: High numbers of patients discharged from psychiatric hospital care are readmitted within a year. Peer support for discharge has been suggested as an approach to reducing readmission post-discharge. Implementation has been called for in policy, however, evidence of effectiveness from large rigorous trials is missing.

Development of a peer support intervention to improve the experience and outcomes of discharge from inpatient mental health care: the role of experiential knowledge in a coproduced approach.

Objectives: Peer support is rapidly being introduced into mental health services internationally, yet peer support interventions are often poorly described, limiting the usefulness of research in informing policy and practice. This paper reports the development of a peer support intervention that aims to improve outcomes of discharge from inpatient to community mental health care. People with experiential knowledge of using mental health services-peer workers and service user researchers-were involved in all stages of developing the intervention: generating intervention components; producing the intervention handbook; piloting the intervention.