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Recent policies on self-care and personalisation have a strong focus on the value of peers as a means through which understanding and knowledge can be conveyed. This opens up new opportunities for community practitioners to work with groups run for and by peers who share the same health or social situation.\ud \ud Selected findings are presented from a three year Big Lottery funded project ‘ESTEEM’ (2010-13) conducted in two locations in England, focussing on the ways in which community practitioners can best support the ethos and practice of peer led self-help groups in the community. The study involved a sample of 21 SHGs and 26 practitioners who contributed to semi-structured interviews, group interviews and workshops which shaped online national resources and subsequent training programmes.\ud \ud The findings explore the types of relationships and core activities that practitioners have with SHGs. suggesting a nuanced picture of practitioner support to groups in three main areas of activity: organisational development; nurturing members and processes and enhancing and sharing expertise. Building on the findings the discussion considers how practitioners can best support SHGs, whilst crucially respecting the autonomy and integrity of the groups. Five roles that practitioners as a ‘self-help supporter’ can adopt are identified.

This paper explores the use of social media by self-help/mutual aid groups that meet on a regular face-to-face basis. It draws on data from the ESTEEM project, which ran from 2010 to 2013 with the overall aim of developing a range of resources for health and social care practitioners on how to support self-help/mutual aid groups. A re-examination of the interviews and discussions that were undertaken with 21 groups in two UK sites indicated that groups’ use of social media was becoming an increasingly important resource. The findings highlight a range of benefits and limitations with self-help/mutual aid groups using social media and suggest a blurring of boundaries between online and face-to-face groups. For groupworkers involved with self-help/mutual aid groups opportunities in developing groups’ online presence are raised.

Self-help groups in the United Kingdom continue to grow in number and address virtually every conceivable health condition, but they remain the subject of very little theoretical analysis. The literature to date has predominantly focused on their therapeutic effects on individual members. And yet they are widely presumed to fulfil a broader civic role and to encourage democratic citizenship. The thesis uses qualitative data derived from individual and group interviews with 33 groups in order to provide an outline of the ethos, aims, activities and structural arrangements of a broad range of self-help groups in Nottinghamshire, UK. It then uses these findings as the foundation on which to construct a model of self-help groups’ democratising effects in the public sphere and as a means of differentiating them from other types of ‘health citizenship’ organisation such as new social movements. In order to do this it broadly follows the work of Jurgen Habermas, making use of his concepts of communicative action; system-lifeworld integration; lifeworld autonomy and collective identity as an appropriate framework against which to account for these groups in civic terms.\ud \ud It was found that in their pursuit of personal and collective identities the groups were augmenting individual autonomy through increasing mutual recognition and understanding in the lifeworld. Although at first sight the groups appeared to be structured hierarchically, leaders tended to use their influence to foster a type of communicative equality that sustained the democratic negotiation of these identities. In addition, through their two-way communicative links with the system the groups were adding to the complexity and quality of discourse in the public sphere and increasing the possibility of attaining social consensus. Unlike new social movements who are believed to operate at the protest end of civil society, the self-help groups were oriented to its enabling sector.