Last week the OMNI SOR Recovery Team hosted a webinar on Addressing Burnout in Virginia's Peer Support Field. As it is also relative to you all's work, we wanted to share it here as well. Some prevalent challenges regarding peer burnout that emerged from this session were:
Supervisors and team members would benefit from a better understanding of what a peer does and doesn't do. Avenues to addressing this barrier could be supervisors and team members learning more about what defines the role broadly, or agencies/teams defining the role more clearly.
Peers need time off or work schedule adjustments to recuperate from burnout, but a culture reluctant to be open about health care providers' mental health and taking time off leads to this not happening.
Lastly, there is a need to value the expertise peers bring to this work more, especially surrounding peers' resiliency and from non-peer staff.
You can find a link a video summary of the information here and a PDF overview of this information here. Both are also listed on the Peer Recovery Research page of the SOR Support website.
This video includes the information covered in the session as well as the discussion questions posed during it. Both are included as we hope that this recording can help facilitate a mini-session on burnout with appropriate groups of staff at your agency. The recording will prompt you to first listen to the information provided and then pause the video at each set of discussion questions.
As always if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the us at sorsupport@omni.org.