Jane, Maddy, and Anna are senior leaders across Quality and Safety, and Clinical, Community, and Lived Experience approaches at Neami, a large national mental health NGO.

Jane, Maddy, and Anna have collaborated on multiple projects at a national level including:
- Establishing and co-leading organisational and discipline-specific approaches for determining and defining scopes of practice, credentialling, and recredentialling.
- Embedding the Lived Experience lens in tone, language, and process in organisational policies, procedures, and guidelines.
- Bringing to life standards for Child Safety and Wellbeing across national services.
- Implementing discipline-specific supervision across Neami’s diverse discipline workforces.

Collaborating has held relational, ethical, practical, and emotional complexities. Jane, Maddy, and Anna have needed to do both hard and heart work to make sense of their different perspectives, work out what is collectively meaningful, and be prepared to hold space for collaboration as purposeful, yet not comfortable.

In this presentation Jane, Maddy, and Anna will share learnings and reflections on their experience of collaboration and how to find and hold common ground amidst discomfort.

Carers often feel lost and excluded when navigating the public mental health system with their loved ones. Carer Peer Support Workers can provide various kinds of supports such as information, emotional, practical and advocacy during the challenging time. These supports reportedly enable service users and carers to have a better experience in the system. Nonetheless, some clinicians remain hesitant about the role of lived experience practitioners in clinical settings. This may have contributed to the limited literature available on the collaboration between the carer peer support workforce and clinicians.

The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health system and the new Mental Health Wellbeing Act 2022 (Vic) calls for the need to recognise the perspectives and expertise of people with lived experience of mental ill-health and families/carers in collaborating, planning and delivering mental health treatment. This paper aims at showcasing an unexpected organic partnership between a clinician and a Carer Peer Support Worker in supporting carers, especially those from CALD backgrounds, in an outpatient clinic in Melbourne. This paper will illustrate the five key factors – shared values, respect, role clarity, knowledge exchange and organisational support in redressing the power imbalances and delivering care through a holistic, family focused and recovery-oriented approach.

Traversing the precarity of polarised perceptions in pursuance of common ground, Clinicians with lived experience offer a wealth of muted potential.

Decades after trailblazer Kay Redfield Jamison's memoir "An Unquiet Mind," brought the concept of beneficial bipolarity to the forefront, the Consumer Clinician identity remains an endangered construct.

With recent statistics concluding that more than two in five Australians will experience a mental health disorder in their lifetime, could the introduction of Consumer Clinicans be the boldly innovative blueprint to commonality?

Through anecdotal narratives entwined with evidence-based research, this presentation dares to delve into the controversial concept of identifiable Lived Experience Clinicans as a step towards common ground.

The inclusion of lived experience workers knowledge and expertise in mental health services is clearly articulated throughout National mental health action plans and stated as an expectation within contemporary mental health policy. Despite the identified benefits, significant barriers and challenges limit their effective integration into service teams. The uptake of allyship roles within organisations has been identified as a potential method for facilitating integration.
This paper presents and discusses recommendations for the uptake of allyship roles within mental health leadership groups to support the integration and sustainability of lived experience workforces. Leaders can influence the allocation of resources, redress power inequalities and facilitate opportunities for the inclusion of lived experience expertise across all levels of mental health organisations.
Research was undertaken through the course of a PhD project investigating the integration, acceptance, and sustainability of lived experience workforces in mental health services. Recommendations were developed in collaboration with the University of South Australia, the South Australian Mental Health Coalition and NGO UnitingSA.
Outcomes of this research focus on areas for learning and unlearning ingrained bias and assumptions often detrimental to peer or lived experience worker integration and hinder movement toward greater adoption of recovery-orientated service delivery within mental health services.
Learning objective: Develop understanding of lived experience allyship, its importance for strengthening outcomes for peer workforces, and consider tangible ways to actively undertake the allyship role.