The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System identified the need to elevate voices of people with a lived/living experience of mental ill-health and of their families, carers, and supporters. This creative session will focus on developing common ground between participants. The session addresses the importance of obtaining and using the consumer/carer perspectives and expertise. The challenges to typical methods of service user contributions to service improvement will be discussed and brainstorming innovative methods to elevate the consumer voice will create hope for trying new ways of engagement. Whilst the group conversation unfolds, a graphic facilitator will record the outcomes generated by the participants.

The St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne Mental Health and Wellbeing Service has implemented and evaluated the innovative method of graphic facilitation as an appropriate and engaging tool to receive and capture consumer and carer experience, expertise, and contributions during service improvement workshops. A graphic facilitator captures conversation, stories, and records ideas on a canvas. We proposed that graphic facilitation provides an innovative method of listening to those with lived/living experience and a different way to elevate the consumer perspective. The outcome of our evaluation has confirmed this to be true.

Our results show that graphic facilitation has been shown to be acceptable to consumers and carers, increases attention/concentration, and promotes participation through idea generation within a group setting. Graphic facilitation eliminates the barriers of literacy and language and allows for engagement by consumers and carers with wide ranging capabilities.

This novel approach has been tested in a wide range of consumer and carer engagement activities, focus groups, and co-design projects. We have used consumer generated canvases to inform service improvement activities across a wide range of service delivery such as physical health, eating disorders, carer support needs and consumer rights on acute inpatient units. Examples of the work we have completed will be shared with participants.

Capturing lived/living experience on a canvas allows for a new method of communicating different perspectives. The canvases co-created by consumers and carers have been used to inform mental health decision-makers of the lived/living experience of mental ill-health. Typical consumer and carer engagement activities can be difficult for health services when traditional methods of engagement are rigid and rely on English literacy skills. Even more traditional is the use of written business plans or service improvement documents, which risk underrepresenting the consumer or carer voice, perspectives and experience of our services. The graphic facilitation canvases were used in a novel way to inform decision-makers and put the consumer/carer voice at the forefront when making decisions on service design and delivery.

Only through this direct experience will participants be able to advocate for this new type of engagement tool within their own workplaces. The participants will find common ground together as they see before their eyes the benefit of capturing conversations in this way. Each participant will be provided with a PDF version of the graphic recording after the event, which will promote sharing of this unique method of elevating the collaborative recommendations of a small group tasked with discussing service improvements.