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Peer Support

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Chronic Illness Care

Abstract

Peer support (PS) links people living with a chronic disease or condition—people who share knowledge and experience that health workers often do not have—for practical and emotional support of behavior change. PS may be understood as providing six key functions: (1) assistance in daily management; (2) social and emotional support to encourage management behaviors and coping with negative emotions; (3) linkage to clinical care and community resources; (4) ongoing support because chronic disease is for the rest of one’s life; (5) being there; and (6) advocacy. PS often includes emotional, social, and practical assistance for how to achieve and sustain complex behaviors for managing conditions and staying healthy. The evidence base of peer support demonstrates its efficacy in chronic illness care and that it is effective in several areas pertinent to “bending the curve” in health and health care, such as reaching populations and those too often hardly reached. Emerging research shows that PS is broadly feasible and sustainable, including in combination with digital health approaches. Financial models are critical to the sustained adoption of PS and there is broad evidence for the cost effectiveness of PS and several models for its financing.

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Acknowledgments

Hannah Barker and Caroline Carpenter provided broad, skillful, and invaluable contributions to the development of the peer support activities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill described in this chapter. Preparation of this chapter has been supported by the Michigan-UNC Peer Support Research Core of the Michigan Center for Diabetes Translational Research (P30DK092926 from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, PI: William Herman) and by funding from the Merck Foundation, Sanofi China, Novo Nordisk, and the Shanghai Municipal Government and the Shanghai Health Bureau.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Peers for Progress, Department of Health Behavior, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Edwin B. Fisher, Patrick Y. Tang, Muchieh Coufal & Samantha L. Luu

  2. Asian Center for Health Education, Plano, TX, USA

    Muchieh Coufal

  3. Shanghai Jiaotong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital and Shanghai Diabetes Institute, Shanghai, China

    Yuexing Liu & Weiping Jia

  4. Department of Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Megan Evans

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  1. Edwin B. Fisher
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Correspondence to Edwin B. Fisher .

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  1. Department of Family Medicine, University of North Carolina, CHAPEL HILL, NC, USA

    Timothy P. Daaleman

  2. Department of Family Medicine, University of North Carolina, CHAPEL HILL, NC, USA

    Margaret R. Helton

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Fisher, E.B. et al. (2023). Peer Support. In: Daaleman, T.P., Helton, M.R. (eds) Chronic Illness Care. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29171-5_9

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