About

Established in 2017, our Co-Design Living Labs program is set to scale across the ALIVE National Centre’s university partners to embed co-design in mental health research, service design, and implementation and translation. We see this as a critical mechanism for transforming mental health care and the ecosystem.

The Network brings people with lived-experience of mental ill-health, ongoing distress, trauma and people who care as unpaid carers, family and/or kinship group members together with researchers, industry and other agencies (as appropriate) for co-design. This includes activities that help to set out research priorities for grants or other related activities (priority setting), co-creating new models of care, co-designing health interventions for implementation, co-developing materials for research, development of digital products, technologies and co-design for service improvement and health systems transformation. Our co-researcher approach embeds people with lived-experience within research activities and projects for Integrated Lived-Experience Applied Research Nationally.

Co-design is also undertaken with health care professionals and other organisations as needed across all health and community settings.