Missouri manual section 6.12
Family peer support
Official service name: Family Peer Support
Family Peer Support connects a family with a trained Family Support Partner who has lived experience supporting a relative with an intellectual or developmental disability and can offer nonclinical information, mentoring, advocacy, and practical support.
What the manual describes
What this service can help with
- Finding and developing formal and informal supports
- Building family confidence, goals, advocacy skills, and problem-solving skills
- Understanding planning processes and accessing services
- Reducing caregiver stress and isolation
- Learning ways to create a safe and supportive home and community environment
- Coordinating family goals with other systems involved in support
Source-backed working pathway
To establish you'll probably need:
These steps translate the cited manual section into a practical review sequence. Confirm the current local process before acting.
Describe the family circumstance and the support being requested.
Identify the life event, planning challenge, stress, isolation, advocacy need, service-access question, or family goal for which lived-experience peer support could help.
Confirm Partnership for Hope eligibility and service fit.
With the support coordinator, confirm that the person is using the Partnership for Hope waiver and that the proposed peer support is nonclinical and does not duplicate case management, Community Specialist, Support Broker, Respite Care, or another covered service.
Define the family goals, format, and coordination plan.
Decide whether individual or small-group support is appropriate, how face-to-face, phone, or electronic contact will be used, and which family, guardian, planning-team, or other-system participants need coordination.
Identify a qualified Family Support Partner.
Confirm the provider's Department contract and the partner's lived experience, age, education or qualifying pathway, background checks, approved training, certification exam, and transportation access.
Authorize a time-limited plan and review progress.
Confirm the authorized units, document how the service will avoid overlap, and set review points for progress, changing family circumstances, and gradual fading as resiliency develops.
Important boundaries
Limits that may affect fit or authorization
- Family Peer Support is available only through the Partnership for Hope waiver.
- The service is nonclinical, episodic, and connected to life events or current family circumstances; it should fade as family resiliency grows rather than continue indefinitely.
- A Family Support Partner cannot provide this service within their own immediate or extended family.
- The service cannot duplicate Targeted Case Management, Community Specialist, Support Broker, Respite Care, or another waiver or Medicaid state-plan service.
- Groups may include no more than four people.
- Individual and group services share a maximum of 640 fifteen-minute units per person-centered service-plan year per family. Additional units require advance authorization by the Division regional director or designee.
Do not assume this part
Questions to confirm locally
- Is the person enrolled in the Partnership for Hope waiver?
- What family goal or current circumstance should the peer support address?
- Could any part of the request duplicate case management, Community Specialist, Support Broker, Respite Care, or another covered service?
- Does the proposed Family Support Partner meet the lived-experience and training requirements and have no prohibited family relationship?
- Would individual or small-group support be the better fit, and how will contact occur?
- How many units remain in the family's current 640-unit plan-year maximum?
- What progress would support reducing or ending the service?