Peer-Delivered Wellness Recovery Services: From Evidence to Widespread Implementation t

A growing body of evidence suggests that peer-provided, recovery-oriented mental health services produce out-comes as good as and, in some cases superior to, services from non-peer pro-fessionals. As evidence continues to mount, the stage has been set for a co-ordinated, national peer workforce de-velopment and maintenance initiative. Reviewing the evidence for peer-deliv-ered services, writing in 2004 in this journal, researcher Phyllis Solomon commented on the “high level of evi-dence ” for peer-provided services, in-cluding four randomized studies and three quasi-experimental design stud-ies using a variety of meaningful out-come measures (Solomon, 2004). The past two decades have witnessed a number of important studies of these models and services that meet these evidence criteria. For example, Paulson and his colleagues randomly assigned community mental health center clients to a peer-staffed Assertive Community Treatment (ACT)1 team, an ACT team staffed by non-peers, or services as usual (Clarke et al., 2000; Herinckx, Kinney, Clarke, & Paulson