Three lead mental health organisations in NSW: Mental Health Association (MHA), Being (NSW CAG) and ARAFMI NSW Inc. (ARAFMI) have co-located as the Partners in Mental Health (PiMH) since 2006. In response to a range of driving forces the three PiMH organisations determined in 2014 to work collaboratively to develop expanded and additional shared services support arrangements, as Partners in Change (PiC).

The purpose of the PiC Shared Services is to improve organisational efficiencies and effectiveness, enhance the quality of service delivery and ensure sustainability. The PiC initiative is widely supported across the sector including from key funding bodies such as the Mental Health Commission of NSW.

Extensive work was undertaken to develop the design and structures of the PiC Shared Services initiative along with underpinning collaborative processes between the organisations to ensure success. A five year proposed implementation plan has been developed with an initial 12 months trial period commencing in July 2015.

In parallel with the Shared Services initiative, a collaborative Hub venture is being developed at the current premises, with upgraded facilities and IT systems due to be ready by June 2015. The Hub will provide accommodation for each of the PiC partner organisations together with supported office space for other organisations, providing an income stream for the PiC.

This paper will outline the rationale for going down this road. It will highlight what we have done and learnt along the way and how through trial and error, we have learnt to work better with each other. We also ensured bringing our staff and Boards along with us to create shared services, shared space and a shared culture.

How do we embed meaningful engagement with people with lived experience, who are best placed to tell us what works or what doesn’t in mental health, in bureaucracy: statewide strategy, policy, planning and legislation? This is the story of the South Australian Statewide Mental Health Lived Experience Register (1) that collects the views, ideas and skills of lived experience and includes them at the planning and policy table (2), (3) in Mental Health Strategy, Policy and Legislation (MHSPL), part of SA’s Department for Health and Ageing.
The Register was designed by people with lived experience both working in the MHSPL and from a range of lived experience backgrounds. It is an award winning engagement mechanism (2013 SA Health Award for Consumer, Carer and Community Participation) that since its launch in June 2013 has grown to a membership of 176, members have been actively involved in 17 major policy areas, eg. Electroconvulsive Therapy, and 10 statewide committees. Recovery oriented leadership is demonstrated by having the people who have lived the reality of mental illness at the table making decisions (4). They keep it real; model resilience and initiate creative, hopeful conversations about building new ways of implementing recovery driven practice from legislation to service delivery.

The benefits of family inclusive practice in mental health settings have been clearly and repeatedly documented in research. However, a focus on supporting parenting can be challenging within the individualised treatment focus of most adult mental health services. “Let's Talk About Children” is a brief intervention that involves a structured conversation between a practitioner and a parent, designed to strengthen the parent-child relationship and address the impact of mental illness on children and family. Here we report on the implementation of Let’s Talk within clinical and community mental health services and family services across Victoria, Australia. Let’s Talk was implemented as part of a broader research project and workforce development strategy, designed to support and sustain family inclusive practice within the service. This paper will outline findings from a series of focus groups and interviews with practitioners and managers regarding the benefits of the intervention and the effectiveness of the supported implementation strategy on uptake within mental health services. The paper will report on constraints imposed on the practitioner within the broader service context to implement the intervention as intended. Key strategies and enablers for embedding family inclusive practice as part of core practice will be outlined.

Experience based co-design (EBCD) is a method used to improve the quality of service experiences in the health care setting. There are two main stages to EBCD. The first stage involves information gathering to find out what's going well and what could be better. This is followed by the development of stories or trigger films about experiences which are shared with staff to increase understanding. The second stage to EBCD is co-design. Co-design is where staff and service users come together in a facilitated process to develop solutions for the things that could be better and implement these. While EBCD studies have been growing world-wide, in Australia EBCD is in the early developmental and implementation stages and rarely ever has it been conducted in the mental health setting. The Mental Health Experience Based Co-design approach developed in Victoria is one of the first purposefully designed EBCD approaches for the mental health setting. This presentation will explore the translation of this experience based co-design method into a best practice reality for mental health service design and planning. It will draw on examples from a current stepped wedge cluster randomised controlled trial called the CORE study.