Alex Hains
I'm now going to pass the mic over to a lovely little gang of people. We've got Imbi Pyman, Ben Brien, Chris Trupp and Jordan Frith, who are all members of the National Suicide Prevention Officers Lived Experience Partnership Group. So all of them have been really deeply involved.
In the development of the national strategy and now also the National Suicide Prevention Outcomes Map. So they're going to talk us through some of that experience. So I'm not sure who exactly I'm passing the mic to, but over to you. Thank you.
Ben Brien
Thank you very much, Alex. So as members of the LEPG, we're going to talk about the reflections of involving lived in living experience and the development. I might just pause, I've introduced myself briefly, but I might just throw it to Imbi, Chris, and then Jordan to introduce themselves as well briefly. Thank you.
Imbi Pyman
Hi Ben and everyone, thank you for having me. My name is Imbi Pyman and I'm equal co-chair with the wonderful Ben and it's a pleasure to be here and be part of the LEPG. So thank you.
Ben Brien
Thanks, Imbi.
Chris Trupp
Hi everyone, my name's Chris. I've been a part of the Lived Experience Partnership Group since its inception in late 2022, and it's been a total pleasure to work alongside the NSPO. Thanks.
Ben Brien
Thanks, Chris.
Jordan Frith
Hi everyone, I'm Jordan. I hope you can all hear me. Apologies for technical difficulties. I'm wearing a very nice shirt today that no one gets to see. I've also been a member of the Lived Experience Partnership Group since its inception and very happily hailing from Yuggera and Turrbal country. So happy to be with you a little bit invisibly, but looking forward to today.
Ben Brien
Thank you, Jordan, for being here invisibly with very much of A presence. And I just wanted to echo that the Lived Experience Partnership Group has a number of members that are here with us today in this session, I'm sure, and have been involved, and it's been a real privilege. So I just wanted to start by saying it really is great to see such an interest here in the hundreds of people that are join to understand and hear about the outcomes map. Speaking for the LEPG members, particularly my own experience, you know, going through this process of co-design and co-development and really co-discovery, it's been really rewarding, and it's something that we've took, you know, with great privilege and significance, knowing that what we were doing.
We have a great deal of responsibility as people with lived and living experience for the lived experience community, but for people impacted by suicide largely. You know, lived and living experience of suicide and mental health and challenges really were at the development of the strategy and thereby through to the outcomes map, you know, through...to the focus of these goals and outcomes. This slide shows some 50 or 61 different frames of work across 10s of hours of work, you know, multiple breakout sessions, 10s of meetings, and I think we can't even quantify just the amount of work and conversation, and kudos to the NSPO for putting this so succinctly.
So we're going to talk today about the reflections and the experience. And I might start by handing over to Chris, who's going to talk about some of the ways that the NSPO and the LEPG came together. Over to you, Chris.
Chris Trupp
Thanks, Ben. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge the Yuggera and Turrbal people as the traditional owners of the land I'm calling in from in beautiful Brisbane this morning. Like Ben said, I'll be speaking to how we collaborated to bring this together and the underpinning of lived experience in the map.
One of my personal reflections is about how the LEPG and the NSPO came together to produce the outcomes map, and in particular how the space was held and how it was intentional throughout the entire process.
So to give everyone a little bit of background, the NSPO and the lived experience partnership group set out to meet as equals with no preconceptions to co-develop the outcomes map in a true partnership, setting a schedule to map out the development as you can see on the slides.
Due to this spirit of partnership, it was really important to mutually establish ways of working before we got stuck into the work. So some of these ways of working were outlined in shared understanding in a one-on-one session that we had together where everyone could show up authentically and be curious about the intention of the map.
We agreed on a schedule to make sure our sessions were sustainable and constructive, instead of trying to rush the process and end up with an ineffective product. We also used smaller intimate groups for the deeper conversations, while making sure that everybody stayed connected. And everybody felt they were able to share their progress and the lessons learned when coming together as a larger group regularly.
Looking back and reflecting for me, the development of the outcomes map was a particularly satisfying body of work to be involved in because it truly lays out ways the rubber can hit the road. The approach that was taken created space for authentic collaboration by setting collaborative ways of working
making space for exploration of concepts and ideas, and allowing both the Lived Experience Partnership Group and the National Suicide Prevention Office to be curious about each other's approaches and perspectives. We could co-develop an outcome map that is both ambitious and based in reality.
My other reflection is on the lived experience anchor of the critical enablers and of the outcomes map. So essentially, when embedding lived and living experience of particular interest, as I said, was the critical enablers of the map.
So being a visual person, when you look at the map itself, the critical enablers act as a foundation for all of the other domains. It's very satisfying to see lived in living experience clearly underpinning the key objectives in domains such as social inclusion, navigating life transition, culture of compassion, system level coordination and so on.
What stands out in particular is the underpinning of collaboration across government and the commitment to map and embed lived experience in the suicide prevention system.
As someone who has had a career in the peer space for a number of years and has seen firsthand the impact of lived and living expertise and the impact it can have on the system decision making and policy, I feel really deeply validated to see it front and centre in the outcomes map.
Thanks, back to you, Ben.
Ben Brien
Thank you, Chris, and really wonderful and insightful reflections. I think, you know, as we reached a point here, you know, we've prepared to do the work and we really had to come understand where we were, get back to a really blank slate, and then focus on how we think about and scope out the basis from the outcomes map, particularly ensuring that we stay true to the principles of lived and living experience and honouring lived expertise.
So this included, you know, exploring starting from a really clear blank slide about how could the outcomes map use the strategy as its foundation and how we ensure that lived and living experiences is really embedded in these outcomes. So you can see here again more and more of these slides and various different sessions of the process we undertook.
And we took, I suppose, really meaningful time and really good, robust conversations about how we unpack that and explore what our individual understandings of it were, given that we are a really diverse lived experience partnership group. We then moved sort of from an individual understanding and then a group's understanding into really where we conceptualise the first, what I've called the paramount outcome stage, which is where we started to really think about how these outcomes translate to both our diverse contexts as individuals and communities, but also within the sector and the suicide prevention sector and within the workforce. You know, importantly reflected on how the language can actually influence engagement. We know that for some people, particularly within sectors, that language is really important, both the impact for people, but for services and systems. And I think this is where we started to really firm up and understand the direction.
I'm really happy to throw to Imbi, who's gonna talk to you know, exploration of those breakout sessions and some of the domains. Imbi.
Imbi Pyman
And very typically with the NSPO, they've been trying to help me with that too, and a special thanks to Michael. So look, thank you, Ben. For myself, the domains of prevention and support resonated strongly. Throughout both, and particularly with the time afforded in the breakout sessions, we were able to share the stories, the experiences and the knowledge to drive the conversation in a very real and very person-centered way. Support in what works and is available is often driven by circumstance or even just good luck, and that's something that needs to change. An example for our family and for our youngest son was an extraordinary police officer who worked in sexual assault and who for many, many months checked in regularly to see how we were coping and who provided tangible and meaningful connexion when we needed it the absolute most. Before his life unravelled, that same son won his primary school public speaking competition where he told the story that many of you may already know. It's the one where the old man walking along the seashore watches a child hurl one starfish back into the ocean after it had been washed up on the beach. There were hundreds. When he speaks to the child and he says, why bother? There are too many to save.The simple response was, well, I can save that one, because every story matches.My son and our family were a saved starfish and we were lucky. That is why measuring the outcomes that matter to people matter. To that police officer, we weren't just a number and neither was she ticking a box. We're here and we're able to share what this person did to make a difference for us.
And it's important that governments, that services and that communities can hear what actually works. So this framework that I'm incredibly proud of, like all of us involved, connects stories like ours to the data so there's a depth in understanding of how people experience prevention and support, because many starfish need saving. I do just want to add that for me, it's an absolute honour and privilege to be part of the LEPG, to work alongside the extraordinary NSPO, where we're reminded that meaningful change happens when lived experience is not only heard, but genuinely valued and embedded in the decision making and help strengthen the evidence base of the critical work that they're doing. So thank you for having me today.
Ben Brien
Thank you, Imbi. Such a beautiful reflection and there's so many staff issues out there in that regard. I just want to say it's a privilege to work with such beautiful people within the LEPG and the NSPO. Thank you. Now I might throw to Jordan, who's going to talk to us about the collective and community impacts and some of the refinement.
Over to you, Jordan.
Jordan Frith
Yeah, and lots of love from the webinar for you, Imbi. I just want to call attention for that. One of the key challenges that we were exploring in the development of the outcomes map is, you know, it's quite an academic exercise, but it also has deep value and significance for individuals, families, communities and populations. So once we kind of got through this initial formative development process that Ben and Chris and Imbi have spoken to in mapping against those domains, we had to take a bit of a broad looking test the outcomes across a few different axes. So part of that meant looking at it at a meso and a macro level, so speaking in terms of communities versus speaking in terms of populations. How can we get the outcomes to describe what's happening at a really large level so that we can get that meaningful data about trends but also how can we speak about outcomes that are meaningful for specific communities and their contexts. And we also played around a lot with the language. So did we want to speak in first person in the outcomes or did we want to speak in third person? We needed outcomes that were person centered, but we also needed to be able to communicate that these were about more than say, an individual journey or experience. They were about broad level outcomes that multiple communities and populations would see themselves resonated in, and eventually be landed on these first person strengths based outcomes that you see in the final version.
Over the next period of time, we spent a lot of time refining all of these pieces. So I think it was, you know, dozens and dozens of different slides, as you can see from these mirror boards, but it was really, really important that we were able to test the outcomes to ensure that they were consistent within themselves but also that they were consistent across each other. We broke out into lots of little groups at the very beginning, but at this stage in the development process, we needed to come back together and look at them as a whole and see, when we talk about prevention, are we speaking in the same way as when we're speaking about what's happening in support? When we're talking about the critical enablers of these, meaningful, are they generalizable, but are they also still resonant for what we want them to be resonant of? One of the most important kind of reflective processes for us as the lived experience partnership group is also recognising where we didn't actually necessarily have in-house expertise about the needs of different communities. So the outcomes map itself is a whole of population outcomes map, but we still needed to make sure that the outcomes that were produced were reflective of legitimate needs of communities, because otherwise we unintentionally embed these cycles of disadvantage and marginalisation that we see in some large scale data collection. And this is where the consultation approach really shone. So you can see a very small snippet here of the number of people that were consulted and that included kind of representative agencies, lots of engagement with the government, lots of engagement with service providers as well to ensure that when we tested the outcomes that we had developed collectively, were they still resonance of the needs of different communities? And we want to acknowledge that we can't capture the voice of every cohort, but what we do hope is that what we've landed on, everyone can see a little bit of themselves in.
So, I'll throw it back to my lived experience partnership group colleagues to close us out.
Ben Brien
Wonderful and thank you to the LEPG members that are here with us today. I just wanted to tidy out and recap. This is obviously quite a lot of information and, you know, around a year and more work that's gone into this. You might even see a bow and some Isa bunny ears in there, which shows that we didn't shy away from this even on, you know, important dates and it really speaks to the partnership and relationships we have. It might move forward, just conscious of time. Just a quote here from the lovely Chris who's just spoken, which I think really speaks to the collaborative nature of the relationship between our group and the NSPO, but also the outcomes being strength-based and person-centered.