Emergency Department Peer Support Worker Workshop

CONTEXT

Emergency department (ED) peer support for addictions is becoming increasingly common in large urban emergency departments across Canada, yet these programs exist in many different forms with varying levels of oversight, evaluation, and institutional support. Some emergency departments partner with community organizations to contract peer support workers, while others hire them directly as hospital employees. Despite their growing presence, there remains a persistent challenge in securing funding to evaluate these programs and demonstrate their sustainability and impact to decision-makers.

APPROACH

DHRIL partnered with the University of Calgary and a network of ED peer support programs across Canada to co-facilitate the Emergency Department Peer Support Summit — a gathering designed to share effective solutions, collect impact stories, and build the evidence base needed to support future mixed-methods research funding proposals.

Our design team led the research-for-design process, beginning with a co-facilitated workshop at the Summit. This workshop was designed to address our overarching research questions, collect relevant data from practitioners and program leads, and generate actionable findings to inform subsequent design phases. Both primary research gathered at the Summit and secondary research from existing literature are informing our process.

The central design challenge is identity: given the diversity of ED peer support programs across Canada, how do we create a unified, professional presence that clearly communicates who peer support workers are and the value of what they do — to patients, families, clinical staff, funders, and the public alike?

FINDINGS

This project is ongoing. Key improvement goals guiding our work through Spring 2027 include:

Growing the network of ED Peer Support Programs in Canada from ten to forty-five, establishing regular and standardized evaluation metrics that capture both health system outcomes (ED length of stay, return visits, addiction service engagement) and patient-centred outcomes, and developing a unified professional identity package for ED peer support workers that is legible and credible across audiences — from emergency department patients and families to funding bodies and decision-makers