So good morning everyone.
I know we've had a really exciting session.
So great to see open dialogue being discussed.
I know I was at University of Melbourne many, many years ago.
We were looking at the evidence base and the applicability of that and we were wondering why wasn't this happening?
But I'm here to talk to you today about the Working It Out Together toolkit, and this is our launch, so welcome.
My name is Dr.
Catherine Brasier, and I'd like to begin by acknowledging that I'm standing on the lands of the Wurundjeri people.
I'd like to pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging, and I would like to pay my respects to the individuals that are First Nations that contributed to the toolkit from both the men's and women's perspectives.
I'd also like to recognise the contributions and the history of lived experience of deep oppression, of marginalisation, of hope being stolen from us and our futures that have been lost because we were told that nothing good would happen to us now.
Sorry, that feels like a bit of a bummer.
So let's move on.
So my name is Dr.
Catherine Brasier, and I'm a lived experience academic, and I led the Working It Out Together toolkit.
I'd like to thank all of the contributors, many of whom are here today, and some of us are on the panel with us today, and we'll be talking to them.
And I'd also like to thank the members of our EAG.
We had an EAG of 25 experts, and I just want to pay my respects and my great gratitude to them and the support that we've received from the Collaborative Centre.
And so I'm going to start by telling you a little bit about what our toolkit does.
Stumbling through the ED doors, barefooted, grubby PJs.
She's not sure what's happening to her, but she knows that she definitely, definitely needs it to stop.
A nice man takes her to a private room, asks about drug use, self-harm, thoughts of suicide.
How long has it been since you slept?
I think it's been days.
I don't really know.
She follows him through the hospital.
He was nice to her, and she likes him.
He asks her what day it is.
She doesn't know, but then again she says to him, I never really know.
I have a boring job.
Who cares if it's Thursday or Tuesday?
It kind of sucks.
They pass between the hospital building, and as they do so, she sees a sign that says,
psychiatric inpatient unit.
And she thought, Yeah, fair enough.
She wasn't worried about the diagnosis.
What she did know in that moment was this sense that she had just lost something that she cannot get back.
And she knew people in her life would feel validated, like this would help them know that they were better than her if they found out that this had happened.
And just like that graduate, an artist and a scholar, that promising future was gone.
That nice man becomes a case manager.
He runs a Youth Day program that she goes to.
This is where she makes all of her friends.
All of her old friends are gone.
Her and her new friends call this crazy group.
And she's developed a new mantra.
It says, Friends that don't call ambulances when you need one aren't really your friends after all.
She's glad that those people are gone.
Fast forward six, eight months.
She's moved back out of her parents' house at the request of her old housemate.
He says, Come move in with me again.
Those old housemates are gone.
And you've got that same thing that my dad does.
And she moves back in and she's terrified.
She doesn't know what's going to happen next.
And he says to her, her housemate says to her, I have to introduce you to someone.
She just went through the same thing that you did.
And he introduces her to his friend Sally.
She also had a mental health diagnosis that made people say, What a shame, she had a bright future.
But actually, she was fine.
In fact, she was in school, she was dating and loving life.
And Kitty thought, if she could do this, maybe I could too.
And as the share house overflowed with hippies, ravers and rebels, a number of which had had hospital admissions, this was a normal part of her social world.
No one cared and it didn't make her special.
People listened to her and they were kind to her.
Still, everything was scary, and she thought, What is next?
And this is what was next.
That was me.
That's actually my story.
What I didn't know at the time was I was going to retrain and become a mental health worker.
I'm a little bit too old to be a peer worker.
We didn't have much peer work back then.
I was a psychosocial rehabilitation worker.
And I worked with complex and different people throughout my career and doing a lot of outreach and residential work.
And that became a really important moving point for me because it helped me understand the experiences of other people and people who had very different lives from me, people who had deep levels of marginalisation, intergenerational trauma and intergenerational forms of deep psychosis and experiences like that.
From then, I pivoted and I became an academic.
As an academic, it was my goal to take what I'd learnt as a worker and what I'd learnt from my lived experience and have an opportunity to apply it and use it on a greater number of people and to impact policy and practice much more broadly.
So that is what I did.
I'm now the National Manager for Evaluation and Research at Wellways.
And it was our great pleasure to work on the Working It Out Together research toolkit with the Collaborative Centre.
I'm going to give you a little bit of an introduction today.
I won't talk for too long, because we'll move over to the panel on the interesting thoughts and ideas that they have to share.
But we started off this project by doing a fairly significant scoping review.
We had 81 papers included, and we did it in 11 weeks.
That's some feat.
What we found about our research into understanding about not just having people as study participants, but people with lived experience involved in the development, the conduct, and the sharing of research, was that there was really strong evidence and really strong calls for this to happen for even up to 20 years ago, and a great philosophy
great philosophies and values that underpin that.
But really nobody was writing about how to do this stuff, so things just kind of weren't progressing.
What was really missing was the how.
The Collaborative Centre came back to us after a little while and they said, We're really interested in the recommendations that you wrote, and we really want to address the how.
So our project that we'll be introducing and launching today is about how to do research that is lived experience centered by including people who have consumer lived experience, experience of distress, trauma, of neurodiversity, as well as individuals who have the lived experience of being a family carer, supporter, kin, and alike.
So that's what we'll be talking about.
So we undertook a really significant project around this.
And I'm just leaving you here with just what I've got is just a brief skeleton of the project.
But I want to talk about, as I leave that lingering on the stage, four main key products which have just been released by the Collaborative Centre that are now live and available on their website.
I'll have the link on the final slide.
It includes
It includes two reports, a pilot report from what we did to look at the final product.
It also includes a really deep, rich report about all of the information that we collected that became the evidence base for the toolkit and workbook.
But I think the bit that people are most likely to be interested in and excited about and hopefully will use will be these two bits, which is the workbook and toolkit and the concise workbook and toolkit.
Both of them share the structure that we've got on screen today.
So as you can see, we've basically got six research stages.
Most of them will be fairly familiar to all of us who do research, in addition to a final research stage, which looks at the evaluation and the impact of the research.
And when I say that, what I mean is, did the researchers listen and change what they were going to do based on the impact and the input of lived experience people in their team?
The difference that we've got between the toolkit and the concise toolkit is pretty simple.
The toolkit is the larger, more comprehensive resource.
It includes basic information about all these different stages and levels of a research process.
So it's ideal for people who might not be familiar with research, who might be doing it for the first time, or who might be doing it in partnership with services or other researchers.
And so it has some background information.
It also has some consumer commentaries by me, because quite frankly, when I went to talk about many of these stages of research and how you'd involve lived experience, it simply isn't represented in peer-reviewed literature.
So it had to come through as a consumer commentary.
There's two more components that are really important.
We'll have a quick look at them before we finish today.
One is that for every action that we have up here, there is also a matching workbook exercise.
So there is something that you can do that is practical, that you can bring the whole team together and you can work on it together.
And that's the difference between the workbook and the toolkit and the concise toolkit.
The concise toolkit just has some very foundational information and the workbook
exercises so that you can come together as a team.
You don't have to flick forward and back through all of the information.
You can just work through the workbook exercises in the way that suits you.
This probably looks to people like a fairly normal research
process.
And I've got to say that I also trained as a social worker, we talk about the idea of smuggling things in.
And I want to just draw attention to a couple of the things that we have smuggled in, sneakily but completely openly, into this toolkit.
I'm going to give you three examples and then I'm going to let you explore on your own.
Feel free to come back to me and have a conversation as well.
Feel free to LinkedIn on me.
The first thing that we asked to do that is a foundational difference is action one.
We want you to create a lived experience, intention, impact statement.
Your intention cannot be to build on your track record.
I don't want to know that.
I want you to tell me what do you intend for the people that you are hoping to impact for in your research.
And I want you to think about and consider what the impacts would be, including what are the unintentional and intentional impacts.
So sometimes when we think about the use of clinical language and a really objective language, what's the impact of that?
I want us to think about that.
It also gives you an opportunity to see if your intention and your impacts are in alignment.
My next sneaky thing that I was very proud of smuggling in was actually action three, which is identify a research question.
Yeah, we
have to do that.
That's the basis of research.
But the sneaky, sneaky, sneaky bit that I did is that you have to then take that research question and take it to the community that you are hoping to impact, that your study is based in, and ask them if it's important to them.
Did you understand it in the same way?
Have you got it wrong, or is it something that they don't even want to happen?
And the reason this was important to me was when I was doing peer review and I was doing grants, for stuff that I didn't care about, I didn't want that.
So I know that we're creating research that matters to us, that sounds good to us, but we're not challenging it by checking with the people who it really matters to.
The last thing, which was also a unique stage of this process, was making sure that you created a plan where you
Detailed the decision-making and power structure of your research team: who got to say no, how, and when, and we did this very clearly in the way that we ran our project we ran and developed this in a walk-the-walk way.
And so we used the lived experience action log in all of our expert advisory groups, and we'll have a look at that in a minute.
And then at the end, we would have to take that back to our key stakeholder and tell them which bits we weren't able to implement, or that we didn't implement, or we didn't want to implement, and show them how we had actually integrated all of the lived experience advice that we had gotten from the EAGs through.
So I'm going to give us a quick look at that.
So here we go.
I'm just giving you an example.
As I said before, for each of the actions there was also a matching workbook exercise.
So here's just a little bit, it's a little bit cropped out, but a little brief example of what some of those workbook exercises look like.
They are designed and they are encouraged always to be quite flexible.
So the last question which we can't see on this is, Do you want to add any questions of your own?
The toolkit is designed to be bespoke and to be flexible.
It's just designed to keep you on track and be authentic as well.
This is the other bit that I was talking about just before, which is how to do a lived experience action log.
Well, I mean, if we have a look at this, because that's really just your minutes, isn't it, that we have at the end of our meeting, except what we do to keep ourselves accountable and to evaluate how successful we've been in integrating lived experience input.
is to add those last two columns, which is outcome A, did you or did you not integrate this?
And then if you didn't integrate it, that very final question says why.
You have to tell us why.
So that's my very super speedy, super quick introduction to our toolkit.
As you can see here, we have got the link and it's just online.
It's pretty easy to find on the site as well if you would like to Google it.
I do think that this has a further translational potential.
We're really interested in using it in quality and safety and across our organization.
It's not just for researchers.
It can have a great bearing on practice and translation as well.
So thank you very much for listening, my kind audience, my rebels and my co-conspirators.
And I hope you get a chance to check this out.
Feel free to come up and talk to us, and I'd like to throw to Paul for the panel.
Thanks, Catherine.
Welcome.
Great to be here for this important conversation.
I'm Paul Barclay.
I'm a broadcaster, journalist, podcaster, and MC, whose microphone's feeding back a little bit at the moment.
So maybe whoever's in control can just keep that
under control.
I'll be moderating this panel and we'll be examining how we can work out together some of the matters that were just raised by Kat, and I'm sure that I'll be learning a lot in the process myself.
There is a lot of talk about co-production, lived and living experience, leadership and research translation, but in practice all of that can feel a bit messy, can raise questions about power,
language, evidence, and whose knowledge actually counts.
The working it out together toolkit shows that when lived and living experience is centered from the beginning, not added in later as an afterthought, it can change the quality of the work.
It alters the questions that we ask, the relationships that we build, and ultimately the outcomes we're all working towards.
But there are tensions.
Between clinical and personal understandings of recovery, between structure and flexibility, between research rigor and relational ways of working, so this discussion really is about sharing what it looks like to do all of this in practice, what is working, what is difficult.
and what we're still figuring out.
You're going to hear from people across research, services and lived and living experience leadership.
Each will bring their own perspective on what it takes to genuinely work together.
We'll hear from each of them.
I'll ask a couple of questions of each of the panelists and then, time permitting, maybe we can do a bit of an interactive discussion at the end.
We'll see how we go for time.
Let me introduce you to the panel and on my immediate left, as you've just heard,
is Dr.
Catherine Brasier, National Manager of Evaluation and Research Lived Experience at Wellways.
And Catherine's focus, as you've probably gathered, is on supporting better connections between people with lived experience, research and service delivery development.
And she previously led the lived experience leadership team at Wellways.
Sitting next to Kat, we have Leanne Byrne.
Manager Lived Experience Sector Partnership at the Victorian Collaborative Centre.
Leanne is a lived and living experience leader with extensive experience across consumer peer work, service reform and system level workplace development in Victoria and is currently Manager, as I mentioned, Manager Lived Experience Sector Partnerships at the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing.
Next to Leanne is
Carolyn Lyle, PhD candidate, final year, I understand, in her PhD in sociology within the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University.
Good luck with that.
And Carolyn's research focuses on young people with depression and/or anxiety within the university sector.
Next to Carolyn, we have Alec Scott.
Alec is a consumer consultant with Western Health and
and a lived experience mental health professional with over five years of experience across public and community mental health sectors.
Hello, Alec.
And on the very end of the panel, we have Jason Thompson, Professor of Mental Health System Reform at the University of Melbourne, a registered psychologist.
And look, I think without any further ado, maybe let's get into some of the questions now that you know everyone who's here.
Yeah, Kat, if I can come to you first of all, and thanks for sharing the toolkit information with us.
I thought we'd just bring this back to what this is all
really about.
What does fundamentally shift when lived and living experience is centred from the beginning of a project rather than brought in later on, which I think has often previously been the case?
The biggest thing that I see is we just do it wrong.
We don't understand.
We often treat people as others.
They're unfamiliar to us.
We don't understand their lives, their experiences.
And the biggest mistake that we make is that we think that we know, or we think that we know because we've been workers or we've been researchers.
But there's fundamental gaps of knowledge between what the people who have those real-life experiences have and what we have when we stand
back from a different point of view.
I often talk a lot about how the people that I worked with, my participants are almost always completely left out of any form of research service delivery.
because they were so marginalised and their lives are so different that when you get a group of people together in a university or in the department, they simply cannot imagine the complexities and the realities of people's lives.
So they cannot imagine people who aren't good with numbers or have trouble planning or, you know, I remember having a worker that sat next to me, she was charging off with a potato peeler because the person that she worked with,
His mum had also had really impactful forms of schizophrenia and didn't know how to cook and hadn't passed on life skills.
And she was going to teach him how to peel a potato because he had to keep buying takeaway because he couldn't cook.
So these are realities and experiences that people can't imagine.
Also, different forms
of being unwell are really difficult for people to imagine and they're almost impossible to explain.
So because we've been so left out of the development of the research question and we haven't had appropriate ways of capturing information that's important to us and targeting things that are important to us, we just missed the mark.
Yeah.
I'll grab the microphone back off if you don't mind.
And also, I think it's important to bear in mind that people who experience serious mental health challenges and trauma are frequently much more capable than is commonly thought, right?
How important is it to get that message across, the message that people who are experiencing these challenges are not hopeless, but actually can in fact be quite capable?
I mean, that's me, isn't it?
We saw my consumer journey.
And I've got to say, this is the weirdest thing, and it's hard to admit because it's a bit political.
But the difference between me sitting in here today and me sitting in a flat in Corio in my ugg boots is the fact that I had a psychiatrist who was quite a radical psychiatrist and a clinician who was also quite radical, who saw me from a holistic and from a psychosocial area.
And they always held the hope, and they just kept telling me, like, no, we think you're going to be OK.
And if it wasn't for those voices, and those messages weren't going to come from my culture.
They weren't going to overcome the stigma that I'd grown up in.
It wasn't going to come from my family.
It was actually people in mental health services that said, I think you're going to be okay.
You're going to get through this.
Just keep going.
And it doesn't mean, I mean, hopefully all clinicians carry those messages, but hopefully all of us in the community can hold that message.
I talk about this idea of disinheritance, and we saw that in the video, which is the future that you thought you were going to have where you were going to be successful and maybe go to a uni and do a PhD.
Because you've had this critical and acute stigmatised experience, that gets taken away from you, and that possibility of you being successful is just automatically disinherited.
So that's one of the concepts I think about for that.
Thanks, Paul.
Thanks, Kat.
Alec, I'll come to you.
and just make sure you've got your mic switched on.
You're working within the services where these ideas must translate into everyday practice if we are to get anywhere.
What does it take to move from we valued lived experience to genuinely embedding that in service delivery or quality improvement?
Yeah, thanks for the question.
I think the first thing is just going to actually just stop doing what they're doing and actually try to build genuine partnerships with consumers, carers, with the community, and stuff that's actually going to be representative of the diversity of the catchments in the communities.
And I think the other thing is just to try and avoid the tokenism, which is still just kind of really, really present throughout
If it's in service design or quality improvement and stuff like that, and actually look at being upfront with consumers and carers about what the level of their kind of influence is gonna be, stuff like that, and setting those clear expectations.
But there's some really cool things from the toolkit, which I think can really help guide that along.
I think the Brave Space Agreement is actually, it seems like a really kind of simple task from its outset, but it's actually a really cool one in terms of how it
allows the groups to decide on their terms how they want to engage, how they want to work, what they want to speak about, and gives them the kind of power.
It also allows to ensure that the group's kind of meeting the, I guess, the diverse communication styles, just the general diversity of different kind of areas that we live in.
And I think the other thing is around, I think one of the biggest frustrations we hear about is like, from consumers and carers is the
We ask for feedback and stuff, and it just doesn't go anywhere.
There's never any kind of resolution on what's kind of heard, whether the change could be enacted, where it couldn't be enacted.
So I think even stuff like the action log is really good, because it actually brings that accountability to actually follow things up, and it allows you to try and close that feedback loop if things...
If things can't be enacted, actually going back to the group and explaining, like, telling them that and explaining why, stuff like that, and where maybe stuff that they've spoken about could be used elsewhere.
So that's the tokenism that you mentioned before, where we say that we're committed to this idea of integrating the experiences of lived experience people and
the fact that that actually doesn't happen, they're just words.
Talk to us about where we are seeing this embedding taking place, and also where we're seeing services getting stuck, where I suppose the positives and the negatives, what are you seeing?
Yeah, well, I think like, you know, if you look at it from two ways over the last like five years since the Royal Commission, where there's actually been some really like kind of meaningful
Kind of change in development stuff, and in terms of in governance and service design stuff, but at the same time, it's all just being very frustratingly slow and kind of always seems to be pushed aside, but I think, yeah, I think the biggest thing is just around...
getting rid of just being present in situations and actually looking at ways we could really embed lived experience into things like governance and stuff like that to really kind of bring around that structural changes that's needed.
And I think, yeah, and just even things that's like, so when I say that, so the governance structures, we often want to try and bring
lived experience in into those existing like clinical structures and stuff like that, which doesn't work.
We still have to use the clinical language, like the clinical kind of hierarchies and stuff like that.
Whereas I think that like we need to actually look at ways to create governance structures that, to include them in, go beyond including, to actually embed them into everything that we kind of do.
And yeah, I think, yeah, that's where like, again, just even things just around
closing a feedback loop to something so simple that doesn't cost any kind of much money is something that could actually just show like consumer care is what's actually happening.
And it's even just for like peer, you hear from peer workers who just say like, well, I don't understand like why has nothing changed, anything like that.
And it's because, you know, the changes are usually it's like kind of really incremental like and small that they can't see them.
But yeah, I think there's like,
Yeah, I think we're doing baby steps and I think we are getting somewhere positive.
Yeah, change takes a long time, doesn't it?
Just quickly.
Yeah, very quickly.
So there's the idea in research that if you can't count it, it doesn't exist.
So we just made sure that we could count lots of stuff when we put together the toolkit.
And one of the other tools that goes with that is there's a bit where you can look at all the phases, how, where, and what was the outcome of lived experience being involved.
So really knuckling down and giving things that services can use.
So just want to promo that other tool.
Great.
Thanks, Kat.
Caroline, if I can bring you in.
You've spoken about the tension between being a researcher and having lived and living experience.
What has helped you navigate this tension and what remains difficult within academic environments?
I mean, one of the things that helped me navigate it was working at Wellways and having an excellent team leader in Kat.
I hadn't really met an academic who identified as having lived and living experience before that.
And I had a lot of internalized stigma around coming out with lived, well, living experience with mental illness.
which was partly, which has been partly helped by my own work around stigma, both internal and public stigma.
But I think a lot of my stigma is internalized.
So, sorry, what was the rest of the question?
Yeah, I might just, just that issue of stigma, I think is so important.
And I was just thinking back to the
the video we had at the beginning of this session, and that line, All of her old friends are gone, which is just such a powerful line, knocks you in the back of your seat, really.
And it's interesting, isn't it?
Because often the people who you're closest to, the people who you have the most close relationships with, are the people who stigmatize you the most.
That must be incredibly difficult.
Yes, and it really actually relates to what Kat said about that future that you imagined kind of being gone.
When I was younger, I imagined having a very bright future and that, as a teenager, disappeared.
And I definitely couldn't imagine myself sitting up here, being in the final year of a PhD, 10 years ago.
I was
fairly dark place, and that future has only come about because of the support of people, of my treatment team, of my supervisors, of people like Kat, and pushing back against the stigma that people with lived experience can't do things.
Yeah, I think the point that you're raising that I think is really important is the personal interactions, having people that understand within academia, understand and can genuinely open themselves up to your own experience.
What then needs to change so that research feels more open and authentic for people coming into it?
Is it just about having more individuals to provide you with support?
What else needs to change?
It's a whole structural system, because there's a whole publish or perish culture there's...
because it's such a, it's not a culture that I, as someone with mental illness right now, could be involved with, as it is just so, I feel like I have to hold myself to higher standards because I have mental illness.
I feel like
I can't let myself slip because it's just such high stakes at the moment within universities to push yourself.
So structurally that needs to change, I think for everyone, but particularly for people with lived experience.
Yeah, look, I mean, I spent a lot of my life in a previous life as a journalist at the ABC talking to academics, hanging around universities.
My partner is a university professor who's supervised countless PhDs.
I can tell you how much I understand about the pressure of undertaking a PhD for anyone, actually.
I mean, it's a high pressure, high stakes world.
So all the best.
And hopefully you find the support and get the structural change that's needed.
I'll hand to Kat and then we'll go to Leanne.
I just want to acknowledge the ways that we handled that.
As I said, we will walk the walk project.
Some of the features of our structure were really important.
So we had Carolyn and Alex who just worked together like champions so that we had people being able to peer support and learn from different lived experiences together.
Claire, do you want to give us a big wave?
You're in the
She was one of our social work students who were trained to work from an allyship position and also to acknowledge Rob who was located in Shepparton but was also a part of our team who was also trained to work from an allyship position.
So there are ways that we can structure and pull things together and that was just one good example.
So, Leanne, I'll bring you into the conversation now.
You're working at a system level, thinking about workforce and partnerships across Victoria.
What does meaningful co-production or collaboration, I suppose, look like to you, where there are lots of stakeholders, pressures and competing priorities?
Can you talk us through that?
Absolutely.
I'd have to say, if you asked me that question five years ago, I would have said, what's co-production?
So my understanding has certainly evolved over a relatively short period of time.
But I think it's really important to be clear about the fact it's not just bringing additional people into the room.
It's about who we bring into the room, who can actually shape decisions, and what changes occur as a result of that and the conversations that come out of co-production.
So it's having the right people in the right place at the right time.
And I'm sure many of you have heard that statement before.
There's no one-size-fits-all with lived experience.
And everybody's voice is important.
We need to make sure that we're representing the diversity of the lived and living experience community.
I also think one of the things that makes co-production work is being really clear about purpose.
and making sure that there is a shared goal so that people can align and come together around that shared goal.
This point's already been made, but look, I think it's really important to make it again.
Timing is important.
When you bring lived experience in at the end, all you're really doing is asking them to validate decisions that have been made, and that's not co-production.
When lived experience is brought in from the outset,
co-production starts to feel real and we see genuine systems change and that can only happen through bringing those voices together and that's how we shape consumer and carer outcomes in positive ways.
So at the Collaborative Centre, our focus is on building the lived and living experience workforces across the state.
And we do that through supporting the development of initiatives such as this one.
And you'll see other examples of the work that we support upstairs on level one.
So if you haven't checked out the booths, please do, because we've got a lot of work represented from our partner organisations.
And I think if you don't build those foundations, so the partnerships, the relationships, getting the right people in the room at the right time, you can't genuinely share power and decision making.
And I think Alec, you mentioned tokenism, and that's when lived and living experience becomes tokenistic.
Yeah, I am interested in this.
Part of the reason that lived and living experience gets tacked on in a tokenistic way at the end is because the gatekeepers have traditionally been the clinicians and the researchers who've operated under the old model and the old understandings of expertise, they have the knowledge
that they're passing on to those who need and will benefit from that knowledge.
How then do you embed this form of lived and living experience leadership into those environments where I imagine old habits and old practices can die hard?
They do indeed.
And I think it's something that it doesn't just happen.
You need to work at it.
You need to plan for it.
It needs to be designed for.
It needs to be resourced.
And importantly, it needs to be protected over time.
I think it starts with creating genuine roles and support structures for all workforces and all people with lived and living experience, and not just the opportunities to contribute.
or, you know, just consult.
Consulting is not co-production and it's not going to embed lived experience in the organisations or the system.
Without the infrastructure and those relationships, again, that I spoke about, lived and living experience voices won't have the authority or the support to actually be leaders within our sector.
They might be present, but it won't be embedded.
I also think it's important to embed lived experience leadership across all levels.
So from executive to middle management to frontline, you know, frontline workers who are actually doing the coalface work with consumers and carers.
It can't be one and not everything.
It needs to be embedded across the entire system.
And that means building sector-wide partnerships, and I touched on that, and that is something that we are definitely very passionate about and do a lot of at the Collaborative Centre.
Another key thing I think around embedding leadership is normalising the fact that lived and living experience expertise is here to stay.
It is part of the ecosystem, and it needs to be heard, it needs to be recognised.
And I think when that becomes business as usual,
we will know that lived experience is actually genuinely embedded in our system and in your organisations.
Great.
Thanks, Leanne.
Jason, if I can bring you in now.
You've talked about research needing to challenge assumptions and sometimes create discomfort.
What does this discomfort look like in a research setting?
How do you balance rigour
and challenge it with a relational values-driven approach that we've also been talking about today.
Thanks, Paul, and thanks for the opportunity.
And, you know, this conversation's given me plenty of things to think about where I really should have been thinking about the answers to these questions.
So I think, you know, that some of the structural issues have been raised.
I'm really glad they've been raised because the
From a research perspective, you have, it's highly competitive as it's been, as we've heard about.
You have metrics you need to be able to hit.
You have papers you need to be able to get done.
You need to be able to hit things in a timeline.
You're probably on a short-term contract and you need to be able to get all those things done.
in order to justify a funding application or something like that.
So you're working within all these sort of structural structures as well.
But the challenge, I suppose, is really, you know, I would doubt whether there's anyone in this room who is not passionate about this area.
And
And we talk about concepts like bringing your whole selves to work, and this is all this is all great, but when we have research collaborations, we have people who...
in a research perspective, we're asking people to challenge closely held beliefs sometimes.
We're asking people to take a perspective of another party.
When we bring these different groups together, sometimes we're bringing our whole selves to work, we're bringing these closely held beliefs together.
together, and then we're having them challenged.
And unless you've got respect for perspective among a group, you know, it's going to be difficult to manage those sorts of relationships.
So the first principle is really being able to empathise with the other people in the research group that you're talking about, you're bringing together, having respect for the perspectives of the other people in the research group you're bringing together as well, and being able to sort of
you know, like step back from what you're probably bringing is you're real, really passionate about this particular area.
And that, you know, that's the real challenge.
But I think in a supportive environment, we can do that.
There's the challenge of making the research partnership work well, which you've just touched on there.
But then there's the question of ensuring that the best new research is translated.
How are we going with that?
Yeah, so there's a couple of things there.
I mean, you've asked a nice scientific question, you know, translating the best new research.
Well, we'll have to define what best is, okay?
So best for whom, under what circumstances?
We've talked, you know, a couple of the, you know, the earlier session today, two talked about, you know, when we go back to the structures, who is this working for?
Is it working for consumers?
Is it working for the service to organise it like this?
Are we talking about experiences of people in services?
Are we talking about outcomes or how do we define outcomes?
So all of these, what I'd say is that the guide that we're talking about and Cat's great work gives us that other practical tool now for us to be able to
you know, guidelines for how to work, how to bring that research together, how to work together to bring the best research and bring those outcomes to bear on the service system.
So it's, you know, we try to talk about the sort of quintuple aim of performance where we are talking about outcomes, we're talking about experience, we're talking about access and equity, we're talking about a system that is able to survive.
And we're talking about the health of the workforce as well.
So often when we're talking about what is the best research, we're thinking about, okay, well, which of those areas of the mental health system are we trying to address?
And yeah, what are the different perspectives that each of the different partners are bringing?
Because they're all important and we don't all have to think the same way.
In fact, in research partnerships, it's very important to have people who think differently and to still be able to maintain the cohesiveness of that group.
So, yeah, sorry, can I just add one more point to that?
Culture is also really important.
You can have all of the right structures in place, the best of intentions, but if the culture doesn't truly value lived and living experience, it just won't stick.
Yeah, and can I get you to respond to that, Jason?
You're at a big university.
Universities are large, slow-changing beasts.
You touched on some of the issues there about insecurity of tenure, publish and perish mentality.
Given all of those constraints and given the essentially slow
moving, some might argue, conservative nature of large institutions?
How do we get the change that all of us here want to see?
Well, I mean, yeah, we're essentially in the very beginning of a transition and transitions, system transitions that are, as you said, big behemoths trying to change it.
It's very, very difficult.
And it's an active conversation in the
you know, health system transitions in any area of health is extremely difficult because you are running up against those structural barriers.
You're running up against the, you know, sometimes it's legal barriers, sometimes it's just timing barriers, remuneration, all sorts of things.
So it's a constant effort.
I think if we look back in 10 years, I think we will, it's much easier to sort of see the progress that we will have made, but we have to be
dogged.
We have to keep pushing in all the right areas.
Kat, there's that old saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but we want to see, obviously, real change for people.
What do we know about what delivers real change?
What actually helps to ensure that this works leads to change for those people who need it, not just the good intentions?
I had another phrase that I used
in a meeting once with my company director, which is anarchy is an inside job and this is a corporate takeover.
And so I don't want us to ever feel like we need to wait for anyone else to do stuff for us to take the lead in this.
I was able to do what I was able to do because I did my school and I got good at stuff and I built up relationships and things like that.
And I have successfully staged a corporate takeover.
So thank you.
Yes, indeed.
Here's to more corporate takeovers.
Perhaps I can put this to both Caroline and Alec.
What gives you confidence?
What gives you hope that things are changing?
Alec?
Well, I think, I mean, to be honest, I think it's that, you know,
lived experience workforce, especially in the public mental health system, just actually just keeps showing up.
And we actually keep...
I mean, I'm not sure, I haven't heard...
I haven't been happy with the pace of the reform following the Royal Commission and where things have gone and what's being shelved and everything like that.
But I think we just have such an amazing kind of community of people who are just going to keep pushing for those things.
And we've already come...
so far.
And I think like it's just, I don't know, it's just the resilience of this kind of this whole group is just really, yeah, I think the biggest kind of factor.
Caroline, any thoughts?
I think I pretty much just agree with what Alec has said that we've come so far in a relatively short amount of time, despite the hurdles that we've faced.
that I think there is hope, despite the hurdles that we still face in terms of funding, in terms of recognition, that I think the lived experience movement will keep growing and be greater recognised by the wider sort of community.
Fantastic.
What a hopeful note to finish on.
I think we needed that.
been a great conversation.
Look, thanks to our panellists, Kat, Alec, Caroline, Leanne and Jason.