The Tasmanian Mental Health Reform Program has led the development of the Peacock Centre in Hobart, consisting of four new community mental health services: a Safe Haven, Integration Hub, Recovery College and community-based beds. They share the common goals of reducing access and treatment related issues for people experiencing mental ill-health and increasing the overall capacity of mental health services.

The models were developed between 2019-2022 through an extensive co-design process. Stakeholders included people with lived experience of mental ill-health, alcohol and substance use and their families and support networks as well as primary health, community sector organisations and peak bodies. They draw on practice evidence from Trieste (Italy) and Floresco (Queensland) to deliver an innovative, creative approach suited to Tasmania.

Philosophically, the new models of care reorient mental health services towards the community, are respectful of and responsive to the needs of people, their families and support networks, value the perspective of lived experience through a significant injection to the peer workforce and are founded on compassionate, recovery focussed care. They seek to improve people’s experience of systems through horizontal and vertical integration, making it easier for people to access supports between and across services.

Lessons shared will include ensuring adequate resources to lead change, allowing time for authentic co-design, the need for targeted recruitment, the critical role of communications and the importance of workforce development to scaffold new models of care. A multi-voice evaluation framework with quantitative and qualitative data will be outlined.

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This presentation demonstrates the importance of co-design for developing and implementing community-based programs that encourage healthy lifestyle change and address physical health outcomes for individuals living with severe mental illness (MI). The purpose of the presentation is to evaluate a co-designed and co-facilitated program that aims to improve mental health by building connection to community, confidence and cardio-metabolic health.

Individuals living with severe MI are more likely to experience premature mortality, comprising one third of all avoidable deaths. This is often a result of high rates of cardio-metabolic disease and poor treatment of physical health outcomes. Despite the compelling evidence and known physical and mental health benefits of exercise, many individuals with MI still lead sedentary lives. This research utilises co-facilitation between peer support workers and exercise physiologists to increase physical activity levels, which has not been done before in the literature.

The predicted findings will confirm the importance of collaboration between exercise physiologists for safe and effective evidence-based exercise delivery, and peer support workers for social inclusion and empowerment to achieve mental and physical health outcomes. This presentation will also demonstrate person-centered healthcare and community integration.

This presentation will evaluate a co-designed and co-facilitated community-based exercise program. Demonstrate improvements in physical and mental health outcomes and support the treatment of MI. Furthermore, this presentation will hopefully demonstrate an exemplary, scalable and replicable model of care that could be implemented in other community mental health settings.

Walker, E., McGee, R., & Druss, B. (2015). Mortality in Mental Disorders and Global Disease Burden Implications. JAMA Psychiatry, 72(4), 334-341. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.2502

Schuch, B. F., Vancampfort, D. (2021). Physical activity, exercise, and mental disorders: it is time to move on. Trends in Psychiatry Psychother, 43(3), 177-184. https://dx.doi.org/10.47626/2237-6089-2021-0237

Embedding lived-experience into mental health care ensures that services support the unique needs and rights of everyone. To develop an effective lived-experience product, humanity, compassion and equity must be baked into the service - from development, through to delivery. Shifting organisations’ culture to value the expertise of those with lived and living-experience of mental ill-health and recovery is essential. Embedding this culture of lived and living-experience and cultivating a sense of compassion within your organisation will enable true person-centred care.

In 2022, leading youth mental health service, ReachOut, developed a new lived-experience product, PeerChat. This digital one-to-one peer support service was co-produced not just with the young people who would use it, but also peer workers who would deliver it. This gave the ReachOut team valuable insight into the prerequisites for a meaningful and effective lived-experience service. The process acknowledged the needs and rights of PeerChat’s intended users, and the peer workers delivering the service, and allowed the team to incorporate them into design and delivery. Join ReachOut's Peer Work Team Leader, Emily Smith, and Senior Manager for Support Services, Marty Janssen as they share their learnings on how to embed a culture of lived-experience into your organisation, and ultimately design an effective lived-experience service built on compassion.

• Effectively embedding a compassionate and inclusive lived and living-experience culture into your organisation is essential to ensuring lived-experience services meet the needs and rights of not only users, but those who deliver them.
• Lived-experience services must be onboarded considerately if they are to be effective.
• How to embed compassion, equity and humanity into your organisational culture, to create an effective and meaningful lived-experience product
• How to design and deliver a service that acknowledges the needs and rights of not not only it’s users but those who deliver it
• How to integrate peer work into your existing operations

The Mental Health Integration Hub is a new initiative born of the Tasmanian Mental Health Reform Program. The Hub forms part of the Peacock Centre development providing innovative care in the community which is underpinned by the philosophy that ‘every door is the right door’.

The Hub offers short term, non-clinical, recovery-oriented support. It is inclusive of families and friends and works in partnership with a wide range of community organisations. People can access immediate support, information and advice, assistance with service navigation and connection to other services, including mental health services.

The Hub seeks to improve horizontal and vertical integration, making it easier for people to access support across and between services.

The Hub team consists of a lived experience workforce and a mental health clinician.

Partnership development reflects that mental health is integral to overall health and wellbeing and is shaped by the physical, social, and economic environments people live in. Inequality in these areas can lead to people experiencing distress and seeking clinical services. Working together in the Hub provides opportunities to build protective factors and capacity and reduce risk factors or social inequalities, at an individual and community level promoting belonging, recovery and community.

Partnership development can help address inequalities in the physical, social and economic spheres of a person’s life that contribute to distress.

The Hub model draws on lived experience to form the core workforce of the service.

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How can we better prepare health professionals to care for people living and recovering from eating disorders (EDs)? Despite clinical advances in the field of EDs, there remains a clear need to move beyond the “pathologizing diagnoses” to more strengths-based, trauma-informed, recovery-focused models of care. Health professions education (HPE) is taught through a diagnostic and biomedical lens that narrowly focuses on clinical diagnoses and treatments and rarely includes the powerful knowledge lived experience expertise brings to understanding the complexities of EDs.

This presentation introduces a unique concept of how co-production and health humanities-based teaching methodologies can shape our meanings and understandings of EDs, including personalized treatment approaches to develop positive therapeutic alliances that support the national treatment principles and clinical practice best standards. Narrative artefacts, including extracts from the Lived Experience co-author’s-diary, offer valuable insights into their recurrent interactions with healthcare professionals and systems. Rich in symbology and story, this presentation will also draw on how visual thinking strategies (VTS) are used to inspire critical reflection, exploration and interpretation of a narrative portrait titled ‘Holding Hope’.