What do we mean when we talk about listening to the voices of lived experience? In a 2023 HJP tutorial on this topic, two main insights were discussed.
1. There is diversity in how practitioners think about being informed by lived experience.
Some practitioners think of listening to lived experience in health justice partnership (HJP) at the service provision level – taking a person-centred, person-led approach and building a relationship with clients/patients to achieve improved health justice outcomes. Others think about listening to lived experience in HJP at a service design, evaluation, policy, and systems change level – establishing a community advisory group, having a dedicated role on a steering committee or seeking input from community voices at the beginning when designing a service.
Either way you think about it, the message is the same – we need to move beyond transactional ways of working with people, towards relational and transformational ways of working. As one member of the Voices for Change self-advocacy group says, “We need people to listen to us … there’s a lot that needs to be changed and we just need more people, more agencies to go for it, there are agencies out there, but you need agencies who are … gonna welcome you, gonna accept you, not just to be there to tick the boxes.”
2. To create meaningful and respectful engagement, bring community voices and lived experience in as early as possible.
As Liana Papoutsis, a member of the Victim Survivor’s Advisory Council for Family Safety Victoria, says in Collaborating with people with lived experience, “There is definitely reason to collaborate with those who have lived experience of family violence … you need to engage people … from the get-go, from the inception point, we shouldn’t be thinking of people with lived experience as an adjunct … (thinking) we’re going to do this and we’ve pretty much made up our mind and then bring in lived experience … it’s almost too late.”
These two insights are only the beginning in relation to our work around listening to the voices of lived experience in HJP. We were excited by the engagement generated from this tutorial, and we’re looking forward to continuing this work with you.
If you’d like to discuss this more, contact partnerships@healthjustice.org.au
