Grant: Project Grant

Unintentional traumatic injuries due to motor vehicle collisions, falls or fires drastically change an individual's life and negatively affect their physical, mental and social well-being. Complex trauma recovery requires patients to receive care in multiple settings before returning home. Patients describe feeling unready to transition from one care environment to another and express a need for greater psychological and emotional support. The majority of trauma care is focused on physical improvement, highlighting the need to provide trauma patients with complementary psychosocial support throughout their recovery. The empathic support that peers provide based on their own experiences is especially beneficial and can enhance the long-term health of trauma patients, reduce social isolation, and improve community reintegration. Further, peer support programs are very cost-effective, with the savings they afford far surpassing their costs. Despite this, no peer support programs have yet been implemented across the continuum of trauma care in a Canadian setting. Building on the work we completed thanks to a 2022 CIHR Project Grant, the next phase of the project will entail piloting our co-designed peer support program to evaluate its feasibility, acceptability and satisfactoriness as well as investigate its initial impact on health and social outcomes. This study will elucidate how the peer support program operates within the trauma care system and how it influences patients' health and well-being. The trial will also answer important questions about the ability to recruit patients and how well they adhere to the program, thereby serving as a catalyst for a future Randomized Control Trial and the eventual spread and scale of the peer support program.