Combining the power of lived experience and clinical expertise to provide exceptional care to people experiencing perinatal mental health vulnerability and perinatal suicidality has been PANDA’s goal for 40 years.

A major challenge to this goal has been the historical siloing and de-valuing of peer work in the mental health sector. PANDA has undergone significant internal workforce integration over the past 24 months, with the aim of providing truly multidisciplinary care with lived experience at all levels of service provision and leadership.

This presentation will examine this transformation from the perspective of service design, recruitment, retention, service delivery and consumer experience. Critically examining the learnings from this process will provide insight to other organisations considering their own transition to an integrated model where lived experience is valued, promoted, and utilised through all service levels, while retaining their clinical service streams.

Innovative and accessible models of care are needed to support the mental health of all Australians. Neami National established five pilot, fee-free, walk-in adult mental health services across Australia with integrated clinical and lived experience teams delivering recovery-oriented care and peer-based support. Neami partnered with the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation to conduct an implementation co-evaluation of these services and develop an understanding of implementation facilitators and barriers. Key to this approach is co-learning between the organisations and within the research team comprising academics, clinicians and researchers with an identified lived experience drawn from the ALIVE Lived Experience Research Collective. A Normalization Process Theory (1) lens is being applied to the project and lived experience perspectives are being centred. We present an overview of this work and results drawn from engagement with service users, service staff, management, and external stakeholders in a mixed methods approach. Project outcomes will be used to strengthen these existing services and provide guidance to the implementation of services into the future. Finding common ground in communities, between services, and within services is critical to implementing new services if they are to transform service ecosystems and outcomes for people seeking support.

We intend to use our presentation to introduce Lived experience across the forensic mental health system. We will talk about how Lived experience collaborates with the Multidisciplinary team and discuss the purpose of lived experience in this setting.

The purpose of the presentation is to bring awareness of the uniqueness of lived experience in a forensic Mental Health setting, demonstrate lived experiences capacity to operate within these settings and promote the value of lived experience as part of the MDT.

We will be discussing anecdotal evidence gathered over the previous year and a half in this setting. This will be co-presented between Lived experience workers and an OT from Thomas Embling hopsital.

We hope to show how lived experience has operated across multiple acute units and continued to grow and expand while bringing recovery-oriented care to consumers and valuable insight into MDT’s.

We believe we can show that implementation of lived experience across acute forensic settings has been viable and provided benefit to consumers and the MDT.

KYS’ integrated approach combines health, wellbeing, and social models of practice; while providing a holistic, wrap around service. This approach allows access to a range of appropriate primary health, mental health and social services. We recognise, for a young person to thrive, their physical, mental health, social circumstances, spirituality, culture, connections and overall wellbeing are all interconnected and must be approached holistically.

This integrated model of care is delivered by staff (psychologists, counsellors, doctors, nurses, youth workers, social workers, peer support workers) who share a common philosophy grounded in positive youth development irrespective of their modality. This philosophy is embedded in the way staff relate to young people and guides the structure and organisation of KYS. The multidisciplinary team enables diverse perspectives all contributing to an overall plan of care with young people.

We ensure that young people are part of a continuum of care which they can access throughout their development as an adolescent (10-25). KYS developed a measurement tool that tracks change in a young person’s overall health and wellbeing over time and provides evidence of this change. This measurement tool provides a shared language across all disciplines and supports a collective intervention.