Dr Kate Davies

© 2016 The Author(s). International Journal of Social Welfare © 2016 International Journal of Social Welfare and John Wiley & Sons Ltd Gray M., Davies K., Butcher L. Finding the right connections: Peer support within a community-based mental health service. This article reports on a qualitative study that examined the organisational enablers and barriers to implementing peer support work in an Australian, rural, community-based mental health service. Interviews with 19 peer and non-peer staff were conducted to identify attitudes towards peer support and whether there were organisational values, practices and strategies that might support the implementation of peer support. The findings revealed that peer support workers were valued for their ability to build trusting connections with clients and to accept client choice in a non-judgemental way. However, peer support workers tended to ¿fill service gaps¿ within intensive, administrative case-management environments. These findings highlight the importance of an organisational-wide approach to integrating peer support, where the responsibilities for adopting new ways of working fall to all staff, not just the peer support workers themselves. Key Practitioner Message: ¿ Practitioners placed high value on the peer support workers on their teams due to their unique personalised engagement with clients; ¿ The roles of peer support workers were poorly understood by team members; ¿ Organisational integration of peer support principles could improve the way all staff engage with clients to reflect a recovery orientation.

© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. This paper draws on findings from an Australian study of mental health service users' perspectives on service user participation to examine the challenges for translating recovery policy into practice. It considers the ways in which national mental health policies and developing welfare reforms reflect and/or contradict the highly personal mode of recovery important to service users; though they seemingly signal potential wins for service user empowerment, they are accompanied by losses for those who do not fit neatly into clinical categorisations. The service users (n = 11) and service providers (n = 6) interviewed for this exploratory qualitative study revealed that recovery was a lifelong process of fluctuating capacity and described a system poorly equipped and often unwilling to move beyond tokenistic modes of participation. The analysis of service user perspectives against the backdrop of policy reform reveals the ongoing tensions between personal and clinical definitions of recovery.