Recommendations for integrating peer mentors in hospital-based addiction care

Abstract

Legislators and health systems have recently begun to explore the use of peer mentors as part of hospital-based addiction teams. Integrating peers into hospitals is a complex undertaking still in its infancy. Peers’ lived experience of addiction and its consequences, combined with their distance from medical culture and hierarchy, is at the core of their power – and creates inherent challenges in integrating peers into hospital settings. Successful integration of peers in hospitals has unique challenges for individual providers, health systems, and the peers themselves. We have included peers as part of a hospital-based addiction medicine team at our hospital since 2015. In this article, we outline some unique challenges, share lessons learned, and provide recommendations for integrating peers into hospital-based SUD care. Challenges include the rigid professional hierarchy of hospitals which contrasts with peers’ role, which is built on shared life experience and relationship; different expectations regarding professional boundaries and sharing personal information; the intensity of the hospital environment; and, illness severity of hospitalized people which can be emotionally draining and increase peers’ own risk for relapse. Recommendations focus on establishing a way to finance the peer program, clearly defining the peer role, creating a home base within hospital settings, creating a collaborative and structured process for hiring and retaining peers, identifying peers who are likely to succeed, providing initial and ongoing training to peers that extends beyond typical peer certification, ways to introduce peer program to hospital staff, and providing regular, meaningful supervision. We hope that our recommendations help other hospital systems capitalize on the practical lessons learned from our experience.

Keywords:

• Hospitals
• patient care team
• peer mentors
• peer support
• substance-related disorders

Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thank Alisa Patten for her support in preparing this article, and the entire IMPACT clinical and research team for their support of peers. Dr Englander would like to thank Juliana Wallace and Sarah Power for their expertise and support developing the IMPACT peer program, and Dr David Bangsberg for his mentorship developing this article.

Author contributions

All authors made significant contributions to this work. Dr Englander, Dr Gregg, Ms Gollickson, Ms Cochran, Mr Colasurdo, and Dr Nicolaidis were involved in conception and design, summarizing lessons learned, developing recommendations, writing and revision of the article. Ms Alla and Mr Collins were involved in conception and design, writing and revision of the article.

Disclosure statement

No authors have any conflicts of interest to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by Oregon Health & Science University. OHSU had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of and decision to submit the article for publication.