Collaboratively designing community-led and community-based services within Victorian Lifeline centres.
Lifeline Direct is a national charity, a subsidiary of Lifeline Australia, who deliver a suite of Lifeline’s services across six geographical regions in NSW & Victoria.
The service offering:
Impact Measurement & Evaluation
Background:
Sue Muller (Better Together Collective) and I partnered with Lifeline Direct to bring together Victorian Lifeline centres, Lifeline Direct leadership, and people with lived experience of mental health challenges to develop possible community-led and community-based services consistent with Lifeline’s vision of an Australia free of suicide.
The findings and recommendations from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System and a recent tender for Victorian Local Adult and Older Adult Mental Health and Wellbeing services acted as catalysts for this piece of work to occur.
Outcomes:
Deeper understanding of how people with lived experience of mental ill-health and suicidality want to receive support in the community, and where current gaps exist
Realistic and practical service offerings that can be immediately actioned
A guide to support Lifeline centres to work alongside people with lived experience to co-design services and meaningfully collaborate in community settings – the guide provides the basics of co-design in its simplest terms, with real life examples and suggested resources of where to go to learn more. The Guidelines are available to all Lifeline centres across Australia.
Building trusted relationships through an online co-design process
The facilitation process centred on the use of co-design and human centred design principles. The sessions occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, and so over three months we met over Zoom with the three voices: Lifeline Lived Experience, Victorian Lifeline centres, and Lifeline Direct Leadership representatives.
This process resulted in development of short- and medium-term opportunities for collaboration between Victorian Lifeline centres and Lifeline Direct to deliver community-led and community-based mental health services.
A lasting impact
We are extremely proud to have been a trusted partner to Lifeline Direct during this time.
It was a critical and time-sensitive project for Lifeline Direct. They urgently needed to understand how people with lived experience of mental ill-health and suicidality want to receive support in the community, and where current gaps exist to create a shared understanding across Victorian Lifeline centres, and to develop a clear vision and roadmap of work to move forward with.
A community pilot program will commence in rural Victoria in July 2023.
“Listening to and working with people with lived experience is how we build stronger services and get better outcomes. Everyone needs to step up in their roles and see these ways of working and the breadth and expertise of lived experience as valuable and core to their jobs, it’s how we will create real change.”
