Six Strategies Peer Support Specialists Can Use to Educate Clinicians

A great deal of effort is made to keep clinicians up-to-date on the most current clinical information.  This is not surprising, given how quickly knowledge about health and healthcare is growing for every clinical field, and the importance of moving that information into practice.  This education is usually done by experts in the field, clinicians and researchers who are focused on specific areas of care.

Peer Support Specialists have a complementary area of expertise that they can and should be training clinicians and other healthcare professionals in.  These include things such as:

·         the experience of having specific illnesses,

·         the process by which people enter, utilize and leave healthcare services,

·         the process of recovery from illness. 

 Peer specialists have direct experience from a perspective that clinicians typically don’t have, and yet need to know.  One of the most valuable roles that Peer Support Specialists can have is to educate clinicians about the experiential dimension of having an illness, engaging in clinical care, and recovering from that illness.  Clinicians need to understand these elements, and yet they don’t get much, if any training in them. 

 You’ll want to think carefully about how to provide this type of education effectively.  Clinicians are used to learning information through lectures, books and powerpoint slides.  There is a danger if we try to use these methods to communicate information about the experience of illness and recovery.  I would argue that the experience of illness is as complex or even more complex than the cause of the illness.  Translating that experience into a lecture will likely result in the loss of the key information.

 If you get an opportunity to provide education to clinicians and other healthcare professionals, consider using some of these formats to can help preserve the richness of the experiential information.

1.       Include patients talking directly about their personal experience of illness, participation in treatment and recovery.  Clinicians don’t get to hear directly about some topics (e.g. “what do clinicians do that you found unhelpful?”), and so this new information will have a big impact.

2.       Use panel discussions of either patients and/or clinicians to encourage people to talk about the experience of care and to share the variety of experience

3.       Encourage clinicians to talk about their experience of being patients in their own personal life.  They  have those experiences but often do not include them in discussions about their own work.

4.       Use data from clinical and research articles to drive home points that you may be making with experiential data.  Clinicians are used to hearing about research data, and if you can include some of that with your presentations, it can be particularly persuasive.

5.       Use quality assurance metrics tied to patient experience.  These are increasingly available and healthcare professionals are paying attention.  These data can help make your points and remind them that the entire field is interested in the experiential aspect of care.

6.       Help encourage more education that focuses on the experiential element of care.  One very popular program is Schwartz Rounds, an innovative practice in which clinicians focus on the experience of providing care as a means of enhancing compassion and healthy connectedness between providers and patients  (Schwartz Rounds - The Schwartz Center). 

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