Reflection by Ms Elise Dettmann, Lived-Experience Research at the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation

I’m a lived-experience researcher at Melbourne University, and in April I received an email from my team asking if I would like to help run a workshop at the Australasian Association for Academic Primary Care (https://aaapc.org.au/) conference. Always up for a challenge, I said yes. The location was the beautiful Geelong Waterfront Campus Deakin University. Our workshop idea was accepted, and planning began. We had the journal article “The Participatory Zeitgeist: an explanatory theoretical model of change in an era of coproduction and codesign in healthcare improvement” by Victoria Palmer et. al. to guide us. 

Hand drawn images by Natalie Seiler. No reprint or copying permitted.

In the workshop, Vicki spoke on the theoretical model of change, Candice ran a menti meter quiz, Jen and Alicia facilitated some lively discussions, and my part of the workshop was to give a 3-minute talk on applying the co-design theory from the point of view of what people with lived experience of mental ill-health thought about seeing their GP about a heart health check. Our team had completed some co-design around this question in 2021. 

On Monday 11/8/25, we ran the 45-minute workshop for the 20 people who attended. There were great questions on the day including “What is co-design?” and “How do we combat possible power imbalances in co-design?” There was plenty of time for lively discussions and we finished the workshop by asking people to set a goal around improving one aspect of their co-design work. 

Time flew on the day. 

Eleven participants shared their goals with us such as:

“To reach out to the participants in our lived experience project to let them know how their contribution has produced a concrete outcome, and what impact that has had.”

“To build a sense of community in my project and establish ways to maintain that human connection throughout the project (e.g., with non-task-related activities)”

“To ensure facilitators introduce themselves to consumers prior to the focus group/co-design.”

We’ll be checking in with them in October to see how they went.

Thank you to Dr Alicia King, Dr Jennifer Bibb, Ms Candice Peart and Prof Victoria Palmer. Together we facilitated what I think was a great workshop on co-design.