Authors: Paula Arro, Kerry Hawkins, Ellie Hodges
Year: 2022
Event: 2022 TheMHS Conference
Subject: partnership, co-design, lived experience
Type of resource: Conference Presentations and Papers
Abstract: SYMPOSIUM: Transformational Leadership and Lived Experience Partnerships
National Mental Health Consumer and Carer Forum (NMHCCF) NMHCCF is a combined voice for mental health consumers and carers. It aims to listen, learn, influence and advocate in matters of mental health reform.
The National PHN Mental Health Lived Experience Engagement Network (MHLEEN) MHLEEN was established in 2018 and aims to embed Lived Experience engagement in the commissioning of primary mental health services, promote and build the peer workforce and have a national network of PHN’s and other stakeholders working together to ensure ‘nothing about us without us’.
The NMHCCF and the MHLEEN formalised a partnership in 2021 to collaborate and work together and identify co-production opportunities and Lived Experience capacity building.
Lived experience co-production and leadership has become an increasingly significant feature of the contemporary mental health policy environment. Currently, multiple organisations and many individuals provide lived experience (consumers, carers and peer workers) input into an array of research, policy, programmatic and practice initiatives. However, the sector lacks co-production maturity and the lived experience workforce is fragmented, variable in quality and lacks a clear understanding of what constitutes lived experience expertise in a system-design sense.
Governments, public mental health services and community managed services also lack coproduction capabilities and the approach towards co-design is variable, ad-hoc and largely tokenistic.
Four Leadership projects have been undertaken to consolidate and promote existing initiatives and resources to facilitate effective growth of mental health lived experience voices and leadership.
They are:
1. the establishment a Lived Experience Leadership Knowledge Hub of mental health consumer and carer leadership-related knowledge and initiatives to be included on the NMHCCF website
2. the co-design of a Mental Health Lived Experience Governance Framework and Toolkit to guide identified priority organisations and jurisdictions when engaging with people with lived experience, and
3. review and scoping of formal lived experience leadership education and training including gaps and
4. partnership and co-facilitating with Yale University offering the Let’s Lead: Transformational Leadership Program offered to emerging leaders in Australia.
The symposium will include presentations from NMHCCF and MHLEEN about how the partnership was established through to the co-contribution of funding and clarifying priority activities needed at a national level. The Lived Experience Consultants will present on the specific project areas. Panel discussion and audience participation through table discussions will be embedded into the symposium.
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