Project description

The EmpPD project responds to existing challenges in the well-developed psychiatric support system, which often has difficulties in reaching people with particularly severe and long-term conditions in the long term. This group of people (defined here by so-called severe mental illness (SMI): Diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression and personality disorders) require complex help, which is increasingly provided by different service providers within the health insurance, rehabilitation and participation system, but is not sufficiently coordinated [3].

The main goal is to optimize post-hospital care for those affected through empowerment, participation and digitalization.

This is to be implemented by developing and evaluating a peerlots:inside intervention with digital support to improve navigation in the psychosocial care system and participation in treatment. It is intended to provide low-threshold contact options, health information, prevention tools and recovery tools to strengthen the empowerment and self-management of those affected. To this end:

1. to record the needs of those affected when using follow-up treatment and navigating the support system, barriers to care and potential measures.

2. development of an implementation and evaluation framework using the Theory of Change method

3. Participatory development of the peerlots intervention, with affected persons, relatives and peerlots. The intervention aims to use peer guides to promote earlier and more sustainable access to outpatient help and the social community, to offer low-threshold, person-centered support in order to strengthen individual resources and recovery concepts and to increase self-involvement in one’s own recovery and treatment.

4. digital support and interaction: As part of the project, we are developing and testing a digital service that facilitates communication between peers and users in addition to personal contact. This digital service aims to provide information on the help system and access routes and to better coordinate the transitions between help services. The pilots are used to develop digital precautionary tools such as crisis plans, treatment agreements and patient directives in order to improve informed decision-making. The crisis plans can be activated by those affected in order to inform the peer guides and thus be able to deal with crises quickly and at a low threshold.

Diagnosis-specific and general information, recovery tools, recovery-oriented psychoeducation, mindfulness exercises and other measures to promote recovery are coordinated and made available via a so-called “Recovery Wiki”. Those affected can use these with the peer counselor or alone to support their recovery. In addition, we enable users to provide other users with moderated, coordinated content on their own strategies and experiences for recovery and their empowerment in the “Recovery Wiki” or to keep a digital recovery diary.

5. The peer guides are trained in the use of the digital application and have completed a peer training course (e.g. UPSIDES, EX-IN) in advance.

6. Evaluation of the intervention effect as part of a study.