What is Recovery Coaching?
September is National Recovery Month, and at BHCHP we are fortunate to have three highly skilled and compassionate Recovery coaches who support our patients in their recovery journeys Recovery coaches are non-clinical professionals with lived experience of recovery from substance use who work directly with patients to engage, educate and support them in their recovery. Each of our coaches work within a unique clinical setting, including our outpatient clinic, inpatient 24/7 respite, and on the street. The kind of recovery coaching they are able to deliver depends heavily on the clinical setting with the patients.
The recovery coaches have four main responsibilities: advocacy, mentoring/education, recovery/wellness, and ethical responsibility. Within advocacy, our coaches emphasize the importance of self and systems advocacy so that our patients value their own choices and decisions while being part of a larger health care system(s). Our coaches also advocate for our patients when they are not present at decision-making spaces, to ensure that patients’ needs are addressed and attended to. Mike Jellison, recovery coach on our street team, points out the importance of identifying allies across different systems to make this work easier and “be good stewards of recovery coaches and BHCHP.”
Having lived experience of recovery, the recovery coaches can share their own stories with patients acting as mentors and building trusting relationships with the recoverees. They serve as role models for recoverees and instill hope to help them move forward. David Reyes, our recovery coach supervisor who works in the clinic as part of the Office Based Addiction Treatment (OBAT) team shares, “My role is to help our patients understand that they are the drivers of their recovery journey. I am simply a passenger in their car, providing guidance and showing the way.” The mentorship piece also goes beyond their lived experience as pathways to recovery are continually evolving. Our coaches stay up to date on their professional education so that they can share the most useful resources with our patients, providers and other programs also working with individuals in recovery.
The third aspect of recovery coaching revolves around improving the patient’s health and wellness, personalized for each patient. At BHCHP, each patient gets to define the parameters of their recovery and “better quality of life” because we know that this kind of trauma-informed care results in positive engagement for our recoverees. David Reyes shares the following examples to demonstrate the different pathways to recovery. For some, recovery could mean signing up for traditional treatment programs that includes acute treatment to help recoverees come off any substances they might be using and then transitioning to clinical stabilization and transitional support services that can assist them with their substance free lifestyle. Others might work on reducing their intake of substances (ex: not using drugs but still drinking occasionally) and incorporating safer ways to consume so that they are actively reducing any injury incurred from use of substances. Some patients are attending classes that teach them about recovery and our coaches help them process what they are learning and guide their recovery plans. Recently, a patient remarked that recovery is “working one day a time to change how I feel inside me and doing things that bring about a positive outcome.”
Considering these myriad definitions of recovery, our coaches emphasize that recovery is a process and not a destination. To help navigate this process, they create individualized goal plans with the patient, addressing any challenge within the realms of health, home situation, personal purpose and wider community. During a recent staff training on the subject, Mike Jellison pointed out that, “recovery starts before anybody enters any form of formal treatment.” This simple point shows the hard work done by recoverees, especially at the beginning of their journey, when there is much uncertainty and hurdles to overcome to get healthy. David Reyes also added, “Just because you use substances, that doesn’t mean you’re not moving forward.” The path towards recovery is fluid and our capacity to meet patients where they are exemplifies BHCHP’s patient-centered model of compassionate and dignified health care.
And finally, our coaches put ethical responsibility at the forefront of all the work they do, with a particular emphasis on addressing personal and institutional biases so that our work advances our core values. Demetrius Dunston, our recovery coach based in respite, comments “The patients can relate to me because I tell them about my personal experience with recovery. What I say to them is how I live. I have to maintain that ethical and moral responsibility.” Our coaches are happy to accompany our patients on this recovery journey, creating this supportive ecosystem for behavior change and growth.
As you might know, the community of individuals and families we serve daily are often some of the most marginalized in our society and carry the unjust burden of multiple comorbidities that result in poorer health and quality of life. Recovery coaching is an important part of the overall health care services we provide at BHCHP. It establishes a unique peer to peer connection between staff and patients, thus acting as a steppingstone to better health. We offer our deep thanks to our three coaches for their dedication and heartfelt work with our recoverees. For them, every month is Recovery Month.
