A growing evidence base, formal training, certifications, and professionalization continue to demonstrate the clinical and ethical value of social prescribing and shared life-experience-based interventions in health care. Peer support is one kind of life-experience-based intervention for which core competencies have been developed. Shared life experience-based approaches to promoting patients’ health tend to be trauma-informed, relationship-focused, and incorporate first-hand knowledge and skills cultivated in the crucibles of specific, often stigmatizing, life experiences and health conditions, such as mental illness or substance use. Shared life experience-based interventions also draw on peers’ guidance in developing and evaluating new interventions’ and services’ efficacy and effectiveness. Peer work can be particularly helpful in promoting health outcomes that rely on minimizing patients’ isolation, maximizing patients’ connection, and drawing prominently on the roles a person’s strengths can play in nourishing insight and healing. This theme issue investigates clinical, legal, and ethical dimensions of life-experience-based interventions’ more frequent integration into how clinicians manage patients’ care plans and how organizations design and implement health service delivery streams.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this December 2026 issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 January 2026.
The AMA Journal of Ethics® invites original, English-language contributions for peer review consideration on the upcoming themes.