Peer Support Project
What is Peer Support?
Peer support involves people who share a medical condition in common work together to help one another.
Peer support includes:
- Listening.
- Sharing
- Learning
- Helping others
- Meeting new people
- Finding new resources and services
What is Self-Management?
- Each day you make choices that affect your health and well-being.
- Self-management is about taking a bigger role to manage your health.
Information and support from your healthcare team and your peer support worker, can help you can learn how to live well with diabetes or depression.
The Hamilton Family Health Team Peer Support Program is a continuation of a project that began in 2006. The project was run by the Hamilton Family Health Team and funded by The Change Foundation. It had ethics approval from the St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton Research Ethics Board.
What do participants have to say about peer support?
“she got me to come out of the woodwork where I tend to hide myself.”
“I could talk to my peer support [worker], I could hear her suggestions, I could say no - it’s just a suggestion, it worked or it didn’t work, I could figure it out on my own.”
“… it was nice to talk to somebody instead of feeling that you had a higher up person than you …”
“there are those days that you’d like to talk to somebody who is just like you and know they’ve gone through the same thing”
“I’m not as scared to tell people that I have diabetes. I always kept it a secret, …at work it’s changed… it’s just been more helpful for me to know that there are other people out there that are in my same shoes…”
|