Digital Peer Connection (CoPEER)
The project is developing a peer exchange service for psychiatric home care. Clients and their relatives will be connected with other interested clients or relatives via a digital platform.
Factsheet
- Schools involved School of Health Professions
- Institute(s) Nursing
- Research unit(s) Innovation in the Field of Mental Health and Psychiatric Care
- Funding organisation BFH
- Duration (planned) 01.01.2026 - 31.12.2026
- Head of project Dr. Anna Hegedüs
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Project staff
Nora Christa Ambord
Melina Hasler - Keywords Psychiatric Care, Outpatient Setting, Psychiatric Nursing, Spitex, Mental Health, Digital Peer Support, Loneliness, Social Isolation, Relatives, Co-Creation Process, Participative Research
Situation
Peer support (i.e. interaction with people in similar life situations) can strengthen hope and self-efficacy and reduce the symptoms of mental illness and loneliness. In this project, the psychiatric Spitex service is supplemented by low-threshold peer-to-peer support that goes beyond regular treatment. Clients and their relatives are connected with other interested clients or relatives via a digital platform. The service starts with a digital self-assessment that identifies individual support needs. Based on this, a suitable, already registered peer is suggested. The match is checked by a health care professional before contact is approved. The exchange takes place 1:1 via a secure chat platform. Conversations can be reported at any time – for example, if someone feels uncomfortable or a person's condition deteriorates. Regular check-in questions serve to assess well-being, identify crises at an early stage and evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. This builds a bridge between professional care and self-management and strengthens the continuity of care by enabling timely support. Digital access also gives highly stressed relatives and clients who have difficulty leaving the house due to their illness location-independent access to the service.
Course of action
The project begins by adapting the peer-to-peer platform, which has already been tested in other areas, to the field of psychiatric home care. In a co-creation workshop based on design thinking principles, health care professionals, clients of Spitex Kriens and their relatives will define the content and functional requirements for the platform. After the prototype has been developed, the content will be reviewed and adapted in a second workshop with the same participants. The validation process will take place in several iterative loops to improve the design, comprehensibility and user guidance until a satisfactory result is achieved. The platform will then be made available as a pilot project for psychiatric clients and their relatives at Spitex Kriens. In this phase, the first people register, are matched and exchange information. After approximately two months, users are interviewed individually to assess acceptance and experiences and to find out where they see the effects of the service.
Looking ahead
If the pilot project shows that the platform offers benefits and is perceived as helpful by users and health care professionals in psychiatric home care, a larger project will be developed based on this. The aim is then to transfer the service to other psychiatric Spitex organisations and create long-term structures for broad implementation. An effectiveness study is then planned with a larger number of users.
