SOCIAL WORK HONOURS THESIS ABSTRACT La Trobe University, Bendigo campus By Melinda Delves

Health care professional perspectives on the value of peer based mentoring programs for spinal cord patients.

The value of peer mentoring relationships in supporting individuals through transition periods is well known in educational and professional settings. However there is growing acknowledgement that persons who experience peer support following a major disability or illness adapt better with the physical and psycho-social challenges that accompany this. Prior research indicates that patients who experience peer mentoring support during the immediate rehabilitation period appear to adapt better and perceive themselves as better adjusted post injury (Sherman, DeVinney & Sperling, 2004; Veith, Sherman, Pellino & Yura Yasui, 2006). Despite this, there appears to be only sporadic attention paid to the value that peer mentoring could play in health care delivery. This research study is framed in reflexive ethnography and commences with the researchers dual accounts of rehabilitation, as professional and as a person with a chronic illness. Mentoring in various forms has shaped the personal journey of the researcher, yet this remained absent throughout the journey of chronic illness. In depth and semi- structured interviews were carried out with five health care professionals that constitute a multidisciplinary team within a specialised metropolitan rehabilitation centre. This was to determine if there were any cultural similarities between the account of the researcher as professional and as patient within a rehabilitation setting. Three broad themes emerged, biomedicine, transitions and understandings of peer mentoring, the dominance of biomedicine in this environment impacted on the effective utilisation of alternative models of support. Future research is now needed to explore alternative models of support, such as peer mentoring, its effectiveness and how these models can be incorporated within traditional biomedical models of health care delivery to provide individuals with holistic health care.