RBC Pathway to Peers

The RBC Pathway to Peers (P2P) program is focused on supporting young adults aged 16 to 29 years presenting to Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency department (ED) with mental health, substance use or chronic health challenges. Many young people have difficulty feeling understood by clinicians with whom they have little in common, often lack trust in the healthcare system, and are unfamiliar with resources and hospital procedures. Deteriorating mental health post-pandemic, combined with increasingly unaffordable housing, and on-going systemic barriers for newcomer, racialized, 2SLGBTQIA+ and other marginalized communities have meant that young people are struggling more, and with less resources available than ever before.

Our team of peer support workers bring their lived experience to patient care with a trauma-informed and inclusive harm reduction approach to support them during their ED visit, and to connect them with community-based resources for their long-term health. Our part-time peer workers - Mahf Nikoo, Stef Figueiredo, Chloe Chalmers and Bella Shulman - help bridge the gap between traditional ED staff and younger patients by providing emotional support, self-advocacy education, coping strategies and practical resources. This clinically complementary care has not only improved patient experience by allowing them time and opportunity to discuss concerns that may not come up in triage, but has also reduced the need for behavioural interventions in some cases.

This year has been a time of change for the team. One of our long-time peer staff members moved on to work in the community, while others returned to universities and colleges to pursue academic endeavours. This September, the P2P and SREMI teams kindly welcomed Rhiannon Thomas as our new RBC P2P program manager. She comes from a community-based and research background, with expertise in stimulant harm reduction, overdose prevention and substance use criminalization. Rhiannon has worked extensively with multi-disciplinary teams, supporting staff with lived experience, with a focus on substance use, mental health, the social determinants of health, and gender-responsive programming. This fall we have also begun recruitment to expand the peer support team and look forward to welcoming new staff by year end.

Our team continues to engage in committee work to build relationships within the ED and across the hospital. We have joined the monthly ED Safety and Security Workgroup to bring a peer lens to reviewing behavioural incidents where intervention was required, and work toward proactively reducing such events and increasing staff, patient and visitor safety. Rhiannon and Chloe joined the Clinical Nurse Specialist in orientation to introduce new nursing staff to the RBC P2P program. We have also joined the Substance Use Disorder Community of Practice to bring a lived experience perspective to Sinai Health’s shared learning group.