The value of engaging people with lived experience to help design and review healthcare services has been increasingly recognised as a crucial step in developing and delivering person-centred care that is effective, appropriate, accessible and safe.
We engaged Mental Health Lived Experience Tasmania (MHLET) to develop a practical and implementable framework for use by Tasmanian health, community service or primary care organisations. MHLET worked with Health Consumers Tasmania and Mental Health Families and Friends Tasmania in developing the resource.
The Seven steps to develop an organisational lived expertise engagement framework has three aims:
- To increase understanding of structured engagement with lived expertise.
- To be a tool for organisations to establish a lived and living experience engagement framework and assess their current practices and policies.
- To provide a consistent set of principles and enactors to inform engagement with lived expertise in Tasmania.
This framework can be used by organisations of any size, including those operating only in Tasmania as well as those working more broadly. The most important success factor is a commitment to implement the steps, fostering genuine collaboration with lived expertise, and respectfully working together to deliver a lived expertise framework matched to organisational capacity.