‘We Need to Get Paid for Our Value’: Work-Place Experiences and Role Definitions of Peer Recovery Specialists/Community Health Workers

ABSTRACT

Despite growing research on peer recovery specialists and community health workers (CHWs) in fields such as substance use disorder (SUD) treatment and recovery support, their workplace experiences are little understood. Through semi-structured interviews with 21 CHWs and peer recovery specialists working within substance use disorder treatment and/or traditional health care settings, we identified six prevalent themes: Benefits/Pleasures of the Role; Reciprocity; Challenges; Duality of Lived Experience; Relationships with Medical Professionals and Supervisors; and Defining Metrics. These themes reveal a complex narrative of system failures, organizational hierarchies, and experiential realities in which shared experiences and personal connections with clients undergird both positive and negative aspects of the role. In the words of one study participant: “We have not taken a vow of poverty, we need to get paid for our value.”

KEYWORDS:

• Community health workers
• peer recovery specialists
• lived experience
• role definition
• work conditions
• secondary trauma
• burnout
• qualitative research

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Hye Young Choi, Ian Knowles, Colleen Daley Ndoye, Anthony Thigpen, Lauren D’Andrea, Justin Thomas, Tee Dorsey, Alexandra Collins, Karla Wagner, Michelle McKenzie, Kate Elizabeth Creasey, Jody Rich, Mimi Wunsch, and Sarah Kler.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Jon Soske is partially supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the NIH under grant number P20GM125507. Arryn Guy is supported by the National Institute of Drug Abuse of the NIH under grant K99DA055508. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.