Sharing narratives about recovery is a central activity in peer support work. Researchers have so far investigated many issues related to recovery narratives, but have paid no attention to how the building and sharing of one's story are modified during training courses. This study examines the beliefs of participants in the first national training to become Peer Support Worker (PSW), funded by the Italian Ministry of Health in 2022–23, regarding how to craft their recovery story to make it ‘professional’.
16 PSWs were interviewed at the end of the course. Implicit theories and beliefs were the focus of the semi-structured interviews. Answers were transcribed and analysed through thematic analysis.
The training represents a decisive moment for socialising the ‘unwritten rules’ about how to build and tell personal experiences. Seven main themes emerged: the story-sharing as the most important tool to understand what happened, as a ‘passage’ of status that changes the feeling between the person and the story through the presence of others, the need for a method for structuring the story, the emotion control as prerequisite for maintaining the right distance between one's story and the user's story—not imposing oneself on the other's experience, the relevance of acting as strategic story director, accepting stories without happy ending and story-sharing for cultural and social change. Results have been discussed with the contribution of PSW, highlighting the potentials and risks.
Training should develop competencies in expressing the story without standardising it, thereby avoiding the reification of the recovery journey into a single version. Story-sharing should not be considered merely as the enactment of a favourable recovery journey; even stories that do not have a happy ending, or that do not adhere to the canons of the ‘recovery genre’, have dignity and social utility. In a nutshell, the PSW must be helped in becoming the filmmaker of the story rather than the performer of a static script.
The PSWs involved played a fundamental role in participating actively by deciding to make available their narratives, reading the results and commenting on them.
Older people are living longer with unmet social needs that impact their health and wellbeing. Social prescribing programs connect individuals with nonclinical services to address these needs. While international programs have shown benefits for quality of life, health and healthcare utilisation, social prescribing research in Australia is limited.
This study aims to design, implement and evaluate a social prescribing program to address the unmet social needs of older adults in Adelaide, South Australia.
This observational feasibility study will use a multiphase mixed methods process and outcomes evaluation. Prescriptions for Connection, a social prescribing program, will be co-designed and implemented in six primary care practices and three council areas. Implementation outcomes will be evaluated using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance Framework. Qualitative data collection, via focus groups for health and social care providers and interviews for older people, will be based on the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research to explore barriers and facilitators, and explain outcomes.
This study will provide novel evidence on the process, outcomes and feasibility of the Prescriptions for Connection program. Scalability, sustainability and modifications to the program will be explored for testing in a larger hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial.
Older adults will participate in codesign workshops and provide feedback on the Prescriptions for Connection program. Community members will be recruited as volunteer community connectors to link older people to social activities. The national peak body for older Australians will be represented on the steering group.
Trial Registration: ACTRN12625000664448.
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