Lived Experience Projects

We have been working in partnership with Just Ideas and the NHS England Public Participation team to deliver the Patient and Public Voice (PPV) Impact and Influence training course over the past 7 years. The purpose of the course aims to support PPV partners to come together and  improve their understanding of their role, NHS structures and where PPV Partners can have impact to contribute to change. The lived experience shared in these sessions continues to be incredibly moving and rewarding for PPV partners, peer trainer and our training team: highlighting the importance of patient voice.

We have also been very involved in the support and facilitation of the 10 Steps for engaging people and communities course. This is all about supporting NHS staff to engage and support people and communities in all aspects of their work.  In order to enable this to happen we have helped to co-create a Local Trainers Programme offering CPD accredited train the trainer courses to champions in the NHS who want to be part of a wider training team for 10 Steps.

For both these courses we work with a fantastic group of peer trainers who are all PPV partners and contribute their time and experience to these courses showing the value of lived experience in the delivery of the training courses. We are grateful to work with such a great group and know that having the PPV experience at the core of the training really helps Participants relate the training to their roles.  

Along with Just Ideas and NatCen, WSA Community is part of the Ipsos-led team, supporting the UK Covid Inquiry listening exercise, Every Story Matters. 

We are supporting Module 3 which explores the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on healthcare systems. We are speaking to a range of people who both used and provided health care during the pandemic and supporting them to share their stories.

The purpose of the listening exercise is to capture the depth of people’s pandemic experiences and turn these into an evidence base that will help the inquiry make meaningful recommendations.

In 2020, Engage Britain commissioned WSA Community and Just Ideas in partnership to deliver the Community Conversations component of the Health and Care Project. The work was carried out between November 2020 and July 2021.

The purpose of the Community Conversations was ‘to generate conversations to hear from people whose voices are rarely part of the policymaking process on what matters to them about health and care’. We worked with Engage Britain to facilitate these conversations, recording feedback and assess what worked and what didn’t.

We have been delighted to follow this work – from the community conversations Engage Britain held a People’s Panel to consolidate the ideas and are working on recommendations to Government and to support change. More information about the work is detailed in this article: https://engagebritain.org/what-we-did/

We worked in partnership with the Inequalities in Cancer Outcomes Network (ICON) to support the research team in incorporating the voice of lived experience. We facilitated an online workshop for over 30 people, either living with or caring for someone with cancer. The workshop provided  some whole-group activity and a chance for in-depth storytelling in small groups.

The workshop created a safe space and brought people together, giving them opportunities to connect with others. The session was also attended by ICON researchers, who wanted to listen to the personal side of cancer to inform their research and build relationships with those affected by cancer.

In addition to the main open workshop we  facilitated two workshops, one for Wai Yin Society and another for Can Survive, as part of this project.   As always the sharing of lived experience is a privilege to hear and we really appreciate the honesty and contribution of everyone involved.

We began working with the Patient Advisory Panel (PAP) in 2019 to help the Francis Crick Institute’s Public Engagement Team in the development of their public exhibition ‘Outwitting Cancer’ which, due to Covid delays,  opened in September 2021. The group fed into every aspect of the exhibition, from commenting on the design to the marketing to the language used. A huge aspect of the co-design was the work on the ‘Oncozine’, which accompanied the exhibition.

Across the two years of working together, the PAP members shared very personal and emotional lived experiences. The openness and honesty really touched every aspect of the exhibition and was very much appreciated and respected by us as facilitators and also by the Crick Public Engagement team, exhibition curator and those involved in the digital content.