Why lived experience belongs on the care team
Care coordination is about connecting people to the services and supports they need. It is also about understanding what is important to the person and making sure their goals do not get lost along the way.
At Magellan Health, one way we strengthen that work is by bringing peer support specialists onto the care team.
Across multiple states, our Recovery Support Navigation, Family Support Navigation and Youth Support Navigation programs provide adult, family and youth peer support alongside care coordination. These programs often support members and families during some of the most difficult times of their lives. A member may have experienced multiple hospitalizations or be returning home from the hospital after a suicide attempt. A family may be navigating services after their child’s hospitalization or preparing for their child to come home from a residential treatment facility. A youth may be involved with the child welfare system and living in a group home while navigating multiple services and transitions.
A care coordinator can help connect services, address barriers and support transitions from one level of care to another. A peer support specialist brings something different to the relationship: lived experience.
The Unique Role of Peer Support Specialists
Peer support specialists draw on their own experiences of recovery or supporting a loved one, along with their experience navigating systems, to help someone who may be going through something similar.
They are not another case manager or clinician. They bring a non-clinical approach that works alongside, rather than duplicates, other supports. This is the kind of collaboration we want to see across the communities we support, with clinical care, case management and peer support working together while respecting the unique contribution of each.
The peer support perspective can help members and families think through what is important to them, understand their options and raise concerns they may not have known how to express. It can also help the care team better understand what the experience looks like from the member’s or family’s point of view.
Members and families may be working with a health plan, hospital, outpatient providers, community organizations and other services at the same time. Each part of the system may make sense on its own while the overall experience can still feel confusing or disconnected.
Peer support specialists can help identify gaps, disconnects and barriers that may not be visible to others on the care team and bring that information back to the care team.
Keeping Recovery and Resiliency at the Center
When someone has experienced repeated hospitalizations, a recent crisis or years of interacting with healthcare systems, much of the conversation can understandably become focused on risk, symptoms and services.
Peer support helps keep the conversation connected to the person’s life beyond the immediate crisis.
Recovery is about more than getting someone connected to the right service. It is also about supporting people to have greater choice, hope and direction in their lives.
We have seen that in our own peer support programs. Eighty-nine percent of members and caregivers participating in our support navigation programs self-reported increases in all three areas: hope, empowerment and self-determination.*
We have also seen reductions in hospitalizations and emergency room utilization when peer support is added to care coordination. For members with high needs, that additional focus on hope, purpose and what matters to the person can help them remain in their communities and stay connected to the supports they need.
Our internal support navigation programs are not intended to replace services in the community.
They are designed to serve as a bridge, helping members and families through a difficult period and connecting them to community-based peer support that can continue after our involvement ends.
Celebrating Peer Support Specialists
Global Peer Support Celebration Day on October 15 gives us an opportunity to recognize peer support specialists and the work they do every day.
It also falls during National Disability Employment Awareness Month, which makes October a fitting time to recognize the value people with lived experience bring to the workforce.
For some peer support specialists, including me, there was a time when working again, building a career or using personal experiences to help someone else may have been difficult to imagine.
Many have experienced mental health or substance use challenges, hospitalization, disability or other significant disruptions in their lives. Through recovery, training and experience, they are now able to draw from what they have lived through to support another person.
People who have received services become part of the workforce improving those services. People who have needed hope are able to offer it to someone else.
As we recognize Global Peer Support Celebration Day, I am grateful for the peer support specialists across Magellan and across our communities who bring their lived experience to this work every day.
They bring something to the care team that no amount of professional training can fully replace: the perspective of having lived through it.
*Data from Magellan 2025 PSOM (Peer Support Outcome Measure) and FSOM (Family Support Outcome Measure).