The Potential Role of Peer Support Workers in General Practice: Perspectives of Consumers, Carers, Peer Support Workers and General Practice Staff
Lawn, Sharon, Rattray, Megan, Fuss, Belinda, Shelby-James, Tania, Byrne, Louise, Worley, Paul, Manger, Sam, Harris, Geoff, Guy, Bill, Alvarez, Amaya, Henkel, Daya, Creedon, Paul, Stephenson, Tony, Isaac, Vivian, Kaambwa, Billy, Ullah, Shahid, and Phegan, Caroline (2025) The Potential Role of Peer Support Workers in General Practice: Perspectives of Consumers, Carers, Peer Support Workers and General Practice Staff. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 53. pp. 125-141.
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Abstract
Primary care (general practice) clinics play a significant role in ongoing mental health care and assessment, treatment, and referral of people experiencing distress. Peer support workers (PSWs) are part of the growing Lived Experience workforce in many mental healthcare settings and evidence for their value is growing rapidly. Yet, this workforce is largely absent from primary care. Qualitative interviews with 10 consumers, six family carers, eight PSWs, and 14 general practice doctors, nurses and administrative staff occurred prior to a real-world trial and explored their perceptions of the potential benefits of introducing a PSW intervention for people who seek help for their mental health within primary care in Australia. Interview data were analysed thematically using Braun and Clark’s six-step guide, following an inductive approach. Four themes were identified: (1) offering companionship, validation, and hope; (2) sharing learnings and providing practical support; (3) aiding in communication and offering consistency to help address service system gaps and health service navigation; and (4) redistributing power and advocacy. There was strong agreement across interviewees about potential positive impacts that PSWs could have in enhancing mental health care in primary care. These benefits require testing within primary care, given known challenges with awareness and understanding of the PSW role by other health professional disciplines in mental health settings, and differences related to how peer support and primary care practice are delivered. Overall, these perspectives and the existing evidence suggest that peer support may lead to more responsive, safe, effective, and person-centred primary mental health care.
| Item ID: | 90084 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1573-3289 |
| Keywords: | Early intervention, Lived experience, Mental health, Peer support workers, Primary care, Qualitative |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2025, modified publication 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Aug 2026 05:27 |
| FoR Codes: | 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4203 Health services and systems > 420305 Health and community services @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 20 HEALTH > 2002 Evaluation of health and support services > 200206 Health system performance (incl. effectiveness of programs) @ 100% |
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