Description
The employment of peer providers in mental health settings has burgeoned in the past two decades and at present the majority of states peer providers in mental health settings. Peer providers permeate the mental health workforce in a myriad of settings and perform a wide variety of tasks. Despite this enormous growth, research strongly suggests that they experience workplace challenges, such as stress due to role ambiguity, conflict, overload as well as burnout, job dissatisfaction and turnover.
A paradigm shift in the delivery of services to individuals with psychiatric disabilities demands that this critical sector of the workforce receive best-practice interventions to relieve role stressors, promote organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and retention. Management and social science researchers have investigated the predictors of burnout, role stress, and organizational commitmentin a variety of employment sectors including health and mental healthcare. The literature enumerates both intrinsic and extrinsic factors that directly affect or act as mediators of the quality of individuals’ work lives. Intrinsic factors are modifiable and particularly important for the peer workforce. Mainstream management has embraced executive coaching as a way to address these factors among employees.
We proposed to use existing knowledge about coaching and to develop and test Coaching and Advancement for Peer Providers (CAPP), a 16-session, individually delivered coaching intervention. Results of this project will include a tested, manualized coaching intervention specifically for the peer provider workforce as well as effectiveness data about the effects of CAPP on burnout, role clarity, turnover, job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
For questions about this project, contact:
E. Sally Rogers, Sc.D., Principal Investigator