Free, evidence-based peer support training for every healthcare worker who needs it. Built by The Emotional PPE Project, and the founding coalition willing to make it possible.
Vicarious trauma and PTSD are real, against the backdrop of mental health and occupational conditions. Untended distress festers, and most clinicians who are struggling never reach professional care.
Peer support is not professional mental healthcare. But it decreases isolation, promotes appropriate vulnerability, and can serve as a critical bridge to professional help when needed. It also builds community where people might otherwise feel invisible.
Peer support that is well-intended but untrained can backfire. A colleague who rushes to fix, minimizes what they hear, mishandles confidentiality, or misses the warning signs of a crisis can deepen the very isolation they meant to relieve. What separates support that helps from support that harms is training, and training is relatively inexpensive to deliver once it is underwritten. That is the gap this platform closes.
Distinguishes burnout, mental health conditions, and acute event-driven distress. Where peer support fits, and what gets escalated.
A five-phase conversation model, with explicit boundaries: not therapy, not debrief, not case investigation.
Sustained listening through anger, deflection, shame, and silence.
Recognizing accumulating warning signs and executing a warm handoff to crisis care.
Sustaining yourself as a supporter, treated as a clinical competency.
The HEART Conversation Framework
A short excerpt of a learner navigating one scenario, practicing the HEART framework against an AI peer that responds to the quality of their engagement.
▶ Watch the 4-minute demoFrom the American College of Physicians. One award per year since 1961, for distinguished contribution to the health care of adults.
On structural barriers to physician mental health care, co-authored with the immediate past AMA president and the AFSP chief medical officer. Three additional JAMA publications.
Featured Partner Resource on the breakout series, which has a recurring focus on healthcare worker distress.
Featured on ABC, The Today Show, NPR, The Boston Globe, Forbes, Healio, The Daily Beast, Medscape, Vox, and JAMA Network.
14 states reformed medical licensing applications restricting access to mental health care, following our 2021 JAMA publication.
Volunteer therapists across 40 states. Healthcare workers connected to free, confidential care.
We are inviting institutions to underwrite this platform as founding partners. Three tiers, distinguished by level of contribution and recognition. Every partner is named on the platform their support helped build, free to healthcare workers in perpetuity. A named commitment signals to peer departments and professional societies that this initiative is real and worth joining.
Awarded by the Covista Foundation, executed May 2026.
Building the platform's legal and governance infrastructure, with Foley & Lardner LLP.