We were very happy to hear that Health Education England has an ambition to double the number of Peer Support Workers in mental health as we believe that peer support is such an important part of early intervention in psychosis. EIP teams in the South of England have grown their peer support workforce from 5 to 26 in the last couple of years.
To support further development, we have set up a monthly forum for peer support workers and this forum is open to other professionals every 3 months.
We are very grateful to Randy Morrison (Director of Peer Services), Sarah Lynch (PIER Programme Manager) Danny Kochanowski (Peer Services Supervisor) and Saras Yerlig (Youth Peer Support Worker from the Portland Identification and Early Referral (PIER) Service in Maine, Portland (USA) who joined us on 20th January 2021 to share how they have embedded peer support work across all their services and how they support peer workers to develop within their role. You can listen to the webinar via this link and view the slides below: