Partnerships launched to strengthen user involvement

Some of us have experienced that important feeling in healthcare when someone truly understands what you’re going through – it can be transformative. But it’s also increasingly rare in an NHS where clinicians are stretched thin and appointments are rushed through.

One of the Government’s 10-year Health Plan shifts is a move from hospital to community. The secret to doing that successfully might lie in an often-overlooked resource: people with lived experience.

Peer support workers – trained staff who meaningfully share their own experiences of a condition – are proving to be a potential solution. Use of services is 10 times higher among people who lack the confidence to self-manage their health and wellbeing. Peer support develops people’s knowledge, skills and confidence, enabling them to take steps to live as well as possible with their condition in the community¹.

Evidence is growing to demonstrate the value of peer support. A peer support scheme for people with mental health problems in Nottingham contributed to a 14% reduction in inpatient stays, with savings estimated at £260,000 for a cohort of 247 people². In addition, an evidence review found that peer support could aid recovery, depression (particularly perinatal depression), and self-belief. It found that service users valued peer support workers, and that peer support workers themselves had improved wellness and recovery³.

We spoke with Shelby Fox, Trust Lead for Peer Support at Devon Partnership Trust, about how peer support is changing the landscape of mental health care – and how it shares surprising common ground with digital healthcare platforms like CareLoop.

What is peer support?

Peer support workers are NHS staff members trained to meaningfully share their lived experience with patients. As a supported self-management intervention, peer support enables people to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to manage their health and address other issues affecting their wellbeing, such as loneliness or self-esteem.

What makes peer support workers unique is that they typically have personal experience of accessing the very services in which they work. “Our peer support workers have lived experience of accessing the services in which they’re working in,” Shelby explains.

At Devon Partnership Trust, the peer support workforce has grown from a handful of volunteers in 2016 to 47 paid staff members today, working across adult services, acute wards, community teams, and specialist services including eating disorders, perinatal care, and forensics.

This growth mirrors a national trend – peer support is expanding across mental health, physical health conditions like diabetes and cancer, drug and alcohol services, and domestic violence support. Peer support has historically been voluntary and unpaid but is now being incorporated into the structure of mental health services – the numbers of peer support workers employed by NHS England increased from 48 in 2016, to 862 in 2019⁴.

The power of sharing lived experience

What sets peer support workers apart from other healthcare roles is the explicit requirement to share their lived experience as part of their day-to-day work. Research shows that peer support improves quality of life, provides experiential knowledge, develops supportive and trusting relationships, and provides emotional support and information that complements clinical care.

“Whilst we’re not discounting anybody’s lived experience, the peer support worker role explicitly requires them to share their lived experience as part of their role,” Shelby notes. “A nurse or a support worker or a clinician could go day by day and never have to share anything, but because it’s an explicit part of the peer support worker role, we are expecting them to turn up every day to really share, sometimes really quite dark places where they’ve been, and they are trained, professionally trained, to share those in a meaningful, safe and compassionate way.”

This ability to connect through shared experience can be critical. Studies indicate that peer support can help people with long-term conditions and contributes to improved clinical outcomes, resulting in cost savings to health and social care.

Shelby explained: “We’ve had a peer support worker that was able to offer some different advice around the time that somebody takes their medication. They said: ‘When I took this medication in the morning, it made me feel incredibly groggy, and I didn’t want to get out of bed, so I now take it in the evenings.’ That made a tangible change to that person’s day-to-day, and demonstrates how clinical staff may not be aware of the actual effect on daily functioning, that someone with first-hand experience would know.”

Bridging hospital and community care

One of the most innovative projects at Devon Partnership Trust involves peer support workers who help people through the critical transition from hospital to community care.

“We have peer support workers working on acute inpatient wards, and they are supporting people that are coming up to discharge, and then they’re also supporting when they’re discharged to the community service for up to four months,” Shelby explains.

This continuity is crucial. “We know that within the first three months of being discharged from hospital is a time that can be particularly challenging for some people, and can sometimes result in people needing to come back to hospital.”

The support provided is practical and holistic – ensuring people are connected with their community, helping them access local peer support groups, and attending these groups with them to build confidence. “If you’ve left hospital and you think that things aren’t really going to get better, but then you’re with somebody that has been in the same place that you may have been, and has been able to recover in a way that they’re now working, and they’re able to then support somebody else, that can really inspire hope.”

Freeing up clinical time

Peer support workers help address workforce pressures by taking on tasks that don’t require clinical expertise.

“Sometimes clinical staff will take patients on leave, and you don’t necessarily need a clinical member of staff to take somebody out of hospital to go and leave if they want to go to the shops,” Shelby points out. “If we have peer support workers on the wards, they can support with leave, this then frees up the clinical staff to do other things.” This also provides the opportunity for peers to offer a more normalised experience of leave and a chance to build a relationship away from the ward environment.

This mirrors how CareLoop operates – by providing remote monitoring and support, the platform enables clinical teams to focus their expertise where its most needed, giving people living with psychosis a better chance of managing their condition at home through digital tools and timely interventions.

Supporting families and carers

Peer support can be a powerful tool for reaching groups that health services too often fail to engage.

“A lot of our peer workers link in with carers and offer a lot of support to carers,” Shelby says. “The transition project that I was talking about, where we’re supporting people on discharge, a lot of the work that they do is working with families, ensuring that they feel ready for somebody to come home.”

For family members, having someone with lived experience can be invaluable. “I think it helps as well as a family member to have somebody that’s been in hospital, has left hospital, and say, you know, this is what my family did, or this is how it didn’t work for me, or it did work for me.”

The future: integration and recognition

Despite impressive growth, peer support still lacks a national NHS framework. Individual trusts must develop their own governance structures, supervision frameworks, and role boundaries.

Looking to the future, Shelby sees enormous potential. “That move from hospital to community is just the perfect place for our peer support workers to fit in. They’re within those local communities, they’re able to ensure that people stay connected, and they’re able to be there on the ground, in the community to support people, so that they may be able to prevent a hospital admission because they’re there, they’re able to link people in with local resources.”

She adds: “Our workforce has grown, I think, just under 8% over the last two years, so even under the financial pressures, peer support workers – we’re still seeing an increase with our workforce.”

For true integration, Shelby believes peer support workers need “a recognised seat at the table” where “their qualifications – their life experience – is just as valuable as the learnt experience from the other traditional roles.”

Peer support and digital health

When teams receive notifications through CareLoop that a person’s condition may be deteriorating, peer support workers can play a vital role in early intervention. As Shelby notes, they’re “definitely able to make contact with those people to possibly avoid admission, or to stop an escalation, and just de-escalate before things get worse.”

Both peer support and digital care platforms like CareLoop represent a shift towards more preventative, person-centred care that keeps people well in their communities while making efficient use of clinical time. They share common goals: freeing up clinicians, providing holistic support, preventing hospital admissions, and ensuring continuity of care.

As the NHS continues to evolve, these complementary approaches offer hope for a more sustainable healthcare system – one where technology and human connection work together to support better outcomes for people, their families, and overstretched clinical teams.

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¹ https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/peer-support/

² https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/TransformingCultureMentalHealthServicesPeerSupport.pdf

³ https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/can-peer-support-workers-benefit-mental-health-services/

⁴ https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/can-peer-support-workers-benefit-mental-health-services/