Certified peer support professionals play an important role in Indiana’s substance use recovery infrastructure. The state is covering the training and certification costs for these professionals in an effort to build the peer support workforce.
Peer support professionals assist people in the recovery process for substance use disorder and use their own lived experience with the disorder or serious mental health issues to aid in that process.
Dr. William Cooke was the only physician in Austin during the 2015 HIV outbreak in Scott County, which was linked to injection substance use. He said peer support professionals can help by connecting with people in a way health professionals often can’t.
“The only way some people know where it's safe, where healthy choices are, is if we have people they trust introduce them to that,” Cooke said.
Cooke said people with ties to those populations played a key role as health professionals addressed the outbreak.
Niki Howenstine, recovery director for the Family and Social Services Administration’s Division of Mental Health and Addiction, said Indiana introduced a new curriculum earlier this year, aligned with national standards. She said the state also started to allow family members of people with substance use disorders to become certified peer support professionals.
"We have really focused on our impact throughout the state by growing our workforce and are currently training up to 100 new peers a month," Howenstine said. "[That] is the capacity for our trainings when they're full.”
The training process is about 48 hours, over the course of two weeks.
“We really highlight things such as ethics within peer work, you know, boundaries,” Howenstine said. “How do we address stigma? How do we interact with our supervisor? And depending on what organization you work with, that supervision may look very different.”
That training is then followed by a proctored exam.
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Indiana rolled out the new training program in January and has covered the cost of both the training and the exam since then.
“The barrier of the cost of becoming a certified peer has been taken on by the division, which has been a really great thing for folks that may have seen that as a problem getting trained prior,” Howenstine said.
Howenstine said the state is also integrating peers into its developing crisis response system.
“Our mobile crisis teams are in a lot of communities now responding to crisis within the community, and it is a requirement that those mobile crisis teams have a certified peer as part of the team,” Howenstine said. “If someone's being sent out as a mobile crisis team, there is a peer on that team for folks to be able to talk to and gain that support.”
Indiana also has 20 regional recovery hubs, covering every county in Indiana. These hubs ensure access to peer support for everyone across the state.
“We have access to peer support 24/7 through 211,” Howenstine said. “Any time someone needs just to talk to a peer support worker, the option to call 211, enter your zip code — so we kind of know where you're at in the state — and then hit option six, will give you access to a peer support worker at all times.”
Howenstine said people can also access peer support professionals through recovery community organizations, or RCOs. There are more than 20 certified RCOs in the state.
Abigail is our health reporter. Contact them at aruhman@wboi.org.