Health Voices Victoria

We communicate regularly with our network of more than 2,000 highly engaged and diverse community members. We tailor recruitment campaigns to help you connect with the people you need to partner with in your project, organisation or initiative. We handle the selection process, ensuring a mix of perspectives and experiences, and we support clear and thoughtful communication before and after each opportunity.

We create practical, inclusive and enjoyable learning experiences for anyone looking to build their skills and confidence in the art and science of community and lived experience engagement. Sessions range from short workshops to immersive programs and can be delivered online or in person. Topics include:

• Consumer and community involvement in research
• Trauma-informed engagement and facilitation
• Creating psychologically safe-enough environments
• Effective engagement on committees
• Co-design essentials
• Hosting community-led Kitchen Table Conversations

We design and deliver engagement that is respectful, trauma-informed and grounded in genuine relationship-building. This includes advisory group formation and management, leading activities such as workshops, focus groups, interviews, surveys, and community-based approaches. We thoughtfully apply a mix of different levels of engagement depending on the project, the context, and the available time and resources. This ranges from consultation, through to co-design and consumer led initiatives. We will always call it what it is.

We often work alongside advocacy groups and grassroots partners to reach people who are seldom heard, and to tailor engagement so it genuinely suits the needs of different communities. Our work ranges in scale and duration from one-off engagements through to multi-year initiatives.

We bring people together to build a shared understanding of what is needed and to shape solutions collectively from the very start of an initiative. We tailor each co-design process, drawing on different models to create a fit for purpose methodology that we implement and evolve as we go. Our approach always supports shared decision-making, carefully wrestles with power dynamics and creates space for different forms of expertise to interweave in meaningful ways. We evaluate and refine our approach as we go. Co-design takes time and resources — these projects unfold over many months, and often over several years.

We help researchers involve communities and people with lived experience throughout the research cycle, from defining research questions that genuinely reflect community needs pre-grant, through to translating findings for broader impact. We can support researchers to create a practical consumer and community involvement plan for a research grant and can partner as part of the research team to enable and support this work if successful.

We work with organisations to create or update Engagement Frameworks to guide their efforts to evolve and strengthen the engagement of people with lived experience and communities at all levels, through to governance. These are designed to be practical, values-driven and built through collaboration. Through workshops and iterative review, we identify strengths and gaps, articulate shared principles and develop a clear path toward meaningful engagement. We also provide support to put the Framework into practice, helping teams implement their Engagement Framework into day-to-day processes, behaviours and ways of working.

Language is a powerful tool. No single set of definitions can describe how every person experiences their health and wellbeing, or how they define themselves. We acknowledge the many terms that are used to describe people and the roles that they play, and that language and preferences continue to evolve over time in the health consumer movement.  After deep thinking and discussion with people across the health sector and beyond, we have chosen words that feel ‘right-enough’ to describe our work at this time.

Here’s how we define these terms:

Lived experience – People with a personal experience of a health condition or conditions including carers, supporters, family members, chosen family and kinship groups.

When we say lived experience, we mean it to encompass living experience too – recognising that some people continue to live with their experience daily. We value the deep and rich expertise that comes from lived experience.

Communities – Groups of people who share common characteristics, experiences, or interests.

These may be shaped by factors such as geography, culture, race, ethnicity, age, faith, gender, abilities or sexuality. A community is not limited to a physical location; it can also exist online. Individuals may belong to multiple communities, and these connections can evolve over time.

Engagement – An umbrella term reflecting a range of ways in which people share their views and expertise to inform, create and lead change. This may be through different methods and at different levels e.g. consultation, participation, collaboration, partnership and leadership.

Members of communities, including people with lived experience, are our central focus as we enable and support their engagement within health and related sectors.

We work with people who bring lived expertise – as leaders, change makers, and community members – united by a shared goal to improve their own and others’ experiences of health and wellbeing.

Partners we naturally align with include organisations in health and related sectors, advocacy and consumer organisations, community groups and condition- and population-specific organisations and groups.

We work with people in formal consumer roles, volunteers, leaders, policy makers, clinicians and researchers.

Improving health and wellbeing requires a wide lens. We see health and wellbeing as more than the absence of illness. It includes living well, free from stigma and discrimination, and addressing social, cultural, environmental, commercial and economic determinants of health – the wider forces and systems that shape our lives. We engage from prevention to early intervention, across treatment, care and support, and across the life course.

The best way to stay in touch with us and find out about collaboration opportunities is by signing up to our monthly newsletter, The Chorus.

Sign up here.

The first step is to email us at healthvoicesvic@deakin.edu.au with a short summary of the support you’re looking for. Someone from our team will then get in touch to chat about your needs and how we can best work with you.

• Consumer Model: Partnering with Healthcare Organisations:
  “This model highlights the opportunities that exist for consumers to contribute to transformational change of the health system, no matter their level of experience. It outlines how consumers and health organisations can
  work in an effective partnership that is mutually beneficial”.
• Aligning the Partnering with Healthcare framework with the Rainbow Tick:
  This fact sheet advises health services how to follow Rainbow Tick guidance when developing plans to fulfil the Partnering in Healthcare framework.
• Guide for Inclusive Community Consultations:
  This guide is designed for health services staff and outlines the main considerations when undertaking consumer consultations. It covers various methods, planning, risk management, and step-by-step guidance on all stages of the consumer consultation process. This guide is a companion to ‘Guide for Engaging Diverse Consumers in Organisational and Governance Structures 2022’.
• Guide to engaging diverse consumers in organisational and governance structures:
  This step-by-step guide is designed to be used when consumers are invited to be part of internal structured processes and systems as partners in decision-making in healthcare partnerships. It includes descriptions of the processes, planning stages and methods for engaging with consumers from diverse backgrounds on service governance, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. This guide is a companion to ‘Guide for Inclusive Community Consultations 2022’.

• Consumer Model: Partnering with Healthcare Organisations:
  This model highlights the opportunities that exist for consumers to contribute to transformational change of the health system, no matter their level of experience. It outlines how consumers and health organisations can work in an effective partnership that is mutually beneficial.
• Six steps to successfully onboarding Consumer Advisors:
  This guide supports health organisations to create processes that ensure consumer advisors are provided with the support, information, and resources that they need to be effective in their advisory roles over the first 6-12 months.
• Six steps to becoming a consumer advisor:
  A visual resource to help guide people navigating the early stages of becoming a consumer advisor.
• Consumer Advisor Skills Checklist:
  This checklist is a way for consumers to reflect on what advisory skills they have developed over time, and what areas they would like to further develop.
• Consumer Advisor Skills Checklist (Editable):
  A word version of the Checklist that can be completed electronically.
• Guide for consumers to self-assess the quality of their engagement:
  This guide supports consumer representatives or advisors to self-assess the quality of their engagement in healthcare organisations.

• Consumer Engagement Train the Trainer Manual:
  This manual contains information that will help to train others in consumer engagement. It explores the characteristics of a good trainer, the principles and barries in adult learning and how to address them, developing learning outcomes and training materials, implementing a training program, monitoring and assessing participant learnings, and self-assessing trainer performance. This manual is a companion to ‘Consumer Engagement Train the Trainer Toolkit’.
• Consumer Engagement Train the Trainer Toolkit:
  This toolkit supports the trainer in planning, implemetating, and evaluating consumer engagement. A series of consumer engagement tools and templates and consumer engagement support resources are available in this toolkit to help trainers and trainees to implement best practice consumer engagement in organisational committees and governance. This toolkit is a companion to ‘Consumer Engagement Train the Trainer Manual’.