Commissioner’s speech for launch of Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy
14.10.20 DHHS Mental Health Week
Introduction
Hello and thank you to DHHS for having me to speak during Mental Health Week 2020.
I’m Treasure Jennings, Victoria’s Mental Health Complaints Commissioner.
My office, which we call the MHCC, is an independent, specialist body that was established in 2014 to safeguard rights, resolve complaints about Victorian public mental health services and recommend improvements.
Today I’m very excited to launch the MHCC’s new Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy, which is the outcome of a project started in 2018.
As the former Minister for Mental Health, the Hon. Martin Foley, has written in his foreword, people with lived experience offer the best insights into how the mental health system operates and, importantly, how it should be improved.
This includes both the design and delivery of mental health services, as well as bodies such as the MHCC who uphold the rights and safety of people with lived experience.
I should say now that the term ‘lived experience’ is used by the MHCC in an inclusive way to refer to the experiences of people with mental and emotional distress, consumers of mental health services as well as the experiences of families and carers, which includes families of choice and any person who is in a care relationship.
Complaints to the MHCC about Victorian public mental health services represent the lived experiences of thousands of people each year and the MHCC plays a key role in ensuring that people with lived experience have a voice when they need it most.
In my view, learning from and working in partnership with consumers, carers and families is key to making meaningful improvements both to the MHCC and the mental health system.
So turning now to the…
Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy
Consumer, family and carer perspectives have shaped the MHCC since its beginnings. But in 2018 the former Commissioner, Dr Lynne Coulson Barr, made an even stronger commitment: that the MHCC would be driven by lived experience in everything it does.
She therefore established a project team led by the MHCC’s original Senior Advisor, Lived Experience and Education, Keir Saltmarsh, which was taken over by Emma Bohmer, who still works here today. The team conducted research and collaborated extensively with the MHCC’s Advisory Council and staff throughout.
The outcomes of this project are represented in the MHCC’s Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy document, which I’m launching today.
The document includes:
Beginnings
- a history of how the MHCC was informed by lived experience consultations during its establishment and early years
Present
- a new driven by lived experience principle developed to complement the MHCC’s five existing principles, which is:
We are driven by the voice and collective experience and wisdom of consumers, families and carers. We honour and respect lived experience in all our work.
a driven by lived experience tree which shows what the principle means in practice, visually representing the experiences we would like people to have when they engage with the MHCC.
The tree was partly inspired by the MHCC logo, as this symbolises things that are ever important: strength, safety and voice – which work together to represent growth, improvement and hope.
The Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy also includes.
- a set of ‘action’ statements that describe the practical approaches we are taking in each of the MHCC’s work areas to achieve the tree’s aspirations
- an evaluation of the MHCC Advisory Council’s experiences of the driven by lived experience principle in practice
Future
To ensure we are driven by lived experience into the future, the project team also created:
- a driven by lived experience strategy with clear, measurable objectives and actions for 2020 to 2023.
The strategy was developed through extensive consultations with MHCC staff and Advisory Council members over two years and informed by wide research.
It is consistent with the recommendations in the interim report of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System in 2019 which recognises that lived experience is crucial to the design and delivery of the mental health system.
Lessons learned
I’ll now turn to the methods by which the MHCC developed it’s Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy and the lessons learned along the way. These may be relevant for any of your workplaces when creating their own lived experience strategy.
From the very start, the project team were guided by the principles of co-production as defined by Roper, Grey and Cadogan in 2018. These include:
- partnering with consumers from the outset
- acknowledging, exploring and addressing power differentials
- developing consumer leadership and capacity.
They were also informed by the International Association for Public Participation’s Spectrum of Public Participation, which describes a spectrum of ways services can seek to involve people in the decisions that affect them: starting from informing through to consulting, involving, collaborating and empowering.
The project team also drew upon the Mental Health Lived Experience Engagement Framework developed by the Lived Experience Leadership Engagement Reference Group as part of the Victorian Government’s 10 Year Mental Health Plan, as well as other research.
Informed by these ideas, the team also sought advice from experts in co-production and co-design approaches, including lived experience consultants and leaders and those experienced in working in these approaches in government.
As the MHCC is a statutory body, the project team didn’t use a pure co-production methodology because decision-making did not ultimately lie with the group. Rather, the team tried to apply the principles of co-production at each point. Where they couldn’t do this they were transparent about it, and still tried to be as collaborative and inclusive as possible.
The project team worked with the MHCC’s Advisory Council every step of the way, including asking them what was important and seeking their input into decisions about how to progress the project. The Advisory Council represents mental health consumers, carers, families and service members. It is a diverse group of people of various ages, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and gender and sexual identities who draw on their unique personal and professional mental health expertise to guide many aspects of our work.
The team also involved staff, including staff with lived experience, in all aspects of the Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy, from the objectives to the words to the colours.
One staff member pointed out that the values promoted by the document – such as feeling safe – need to apply to everyone as the gold standard, not just people who contact the MHCC. This is partly because one can’t make assumptions about who does or doesn’t have lived experience so we need to treat everyone, including staff, with the same values. This was an important lesson for the project team.
The ‘you’ or ‘outcome’ statements in the tree and the action statements were both developed with MHCC staff and the Advisory Council.
The team realised we needed to capture the practical outcomes we wanted for people, including the feeling that they were contributing to positive change. These are represented in the tree.
Then it realised we needed a way for staff to actually achieve those outcomes, a framework for orientation, training and monitoring our performance over time as we implement the strategy. This is how we came to create the action statements. The ‘you’ or ‘outcome’ statements in the tree work as ‘banners’, and the action statements as the detail.
The MHCC has these values at the heart of everything we do and we will continue to measure ourselves against them, for example through feedback and surveys and regular reports.
Working collaboratively with co-production principles in a project about cultural change takes time, and little progressed quickly or in a straight line. Nevertheless, all parties hung in there and kept going. Taking time is important to hear from all the people that matter and to develop a safe space for people to share their important input. As such, we were able to carefully and meaningfully involve people with lived experience at all key decision-making stages along the way, and importantly check that what we understood from their feedback that what we heard is what they intended.
The MHCC also takes this approach in our complaints process - we acknowledge that people with lived experience need time to feel comfortable to tell their story and trust us to honour their experiences.
The project gained more momentum when two staff with lived experience joined the MHCC’s management group, and were therefore at the centre of the ‘table’: Emma, the Senior Advisor, Lived Experience and Education, and Maggie Toko, one of Victoria’s most respected lived experience leaders who was the MHCC’s Deputy Commissioner in 2020 after taking a leave of absence from her role as CEO of VMIAC.
Conclusion
So, to finish, I hope you will look and share the MHCC’s Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy, which will be available on our website very soon.
Mental Health Week, with the theme ‘mental health matters’ is the perfect time to launch it.
I thank all the mental health consumers, families and carers who have informed the ways in which the MHCC should perform its role since the very beginning, as well as all those involved in the Driven by Lived Experience Framework and Strategy, which has captured the central importance of lived experience so well.
As Dr Anthony Stratford, Inaugural Chair of the MHCC’s Advisory Council and lived Experience Leader says in the document, “it is globally recognised now how important lived experience voices are in all matters relating to mental health systems and recovery”, including by our very own Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.
The framework and strategy represent my commitment, as Commissioner, to the MHCC being driven by lived experience in everything we do. We will continue to build on our history, evaluate our progress with clear measures, and grow our approach in the future.
Your feedback and questions are most welcome.
Thank you.
Treasure Jennings
Mental Health Complaints Commissioner
Updated