Effects of Peer Recovery Coaches on Substance Abuse Treatment Engagement Among Child Welfare-Involved Parents

There is a limited, but growing body of research on the effectiveness of peer recovery coaches in promoting treatment engagement, retention, and completion among child welfare-involved parents with substance use disorders. A quasi-experimental design was employed using propensity score matching to examine treatment engagement and treatment completion among child welfare-involved substance abusing parents who were exposed to either peer recovery coach engagement services or professional, non-peer engagement services. Using propensity scoring, the comparison sample of parents that did not have peer recovery coaches was statistically matched on the presence of substance exposed newborns, parental use of methamphetamine, and other predictors of maltreatment recurrence and substance abuse treatment engagement. We examined the effect of peer recovery coaches on outreach, assessment, service initiation, and treatment completion. Participants who were exposed to peer recovery coaches engaged in treatment services at a higher rate and more rapidly despite receiving fewer outreach attempts, relative to participants who received only professional staff outreach services. Those participants who received peer recovery outreach services also demonstrated longer engagement in treatment than their counterparts exposed to professional outreach services only. Interestingly, those participants exposed to professional outreach services demonstrated higher rates of treatment completion, relative to their counterparts exposed to peer recovery coaching. Given that recovery coaches were assigned to clients for only the first 60 days, these findings suggest that peer recovery services may need to be provided for a greater length of time for improved treatment completion rates to be observed