Lived Experience Peak

Mental Health Lived Experience Peak Queensland (MHLEPQ) is new mental health consumer representative peak organisation for Queensland, aiming to help advance lived-experience-led reform.

The Queensland Government is committed to ensuring the voices of people with a lived experience of mental ill-health are heard at all levels of the mental health system.

Why is this important

The voice of lived and living experience is critical to driving and implementing system reform through governance, decision-making, design and implementation across the mental health system.

Queensland had been without a lived experience mental health peak body for several years, until in early 2020, the Queensland Government provided funding to establish a new mental health consumer representative peak to represent Queenslanders who use public mental health services.

What we did

The Queensland Mental Health Commission (the Commission) oversaw the project to establish the MHLEPQ from 2020 under an auspicing arrangement that ended in December 2022. The MHLEPQ became fully operational and directly funded by Queensland Health from 1 January 2023.

The role of the new MHLEPQ is to:

• provide policy advice and system advocacy representing the common interests of mental health consumers of all ages and backgrounds across Queensland

• bring emerging issues to government for consideration

• empower — through training, mentoring and support — individual consumer representatives to provide personal perspectives and experiences on public mental health policy and planning issues.

Visit the MHLEPQ website to find out more about how to get involved, including how to join for free as a lived experience member.

Project information

The establishment of the MHLEPQ was guided by co-design principles. This included:

• Using the lived experience-led reform work the Commission has already championed under the Stretch2Engage Framework and the Queensland Framework for the Development of the Mental Health Lived Experience Workforce, along with other relevant state and national resources.

• Recruiting a lived experience project team to manage all aspects of establishing the mental health consumer representative peak organisation.

• Having the project governed by a project steering committee co-chaired by a person with lived experience and the Queensland Mental Health Commissioner. The majority of the project steering committee members also had lived experience. You can learn more about the committee and their experiences here.

Project steering committee meetings

The Committee met ten times between 2020 and 2021 to make decisions about the governance and structure of the mental health consumer representative peak organisation. After each meeting, a communique was produced.

• Meeting one

• Meeting two

• Meeting three

• Meeting four

• Meeting five

• Meeting six

• Meeting seven

• Meeting eight

• Meeting nine

• Meeting ten

The Committee’s work was wrapped up after the final meeting in June 2021.

Evaluation

The project to establish and auspice the new mental health consumer representative peak was evaluated by lived experience evaluator, Jo Farmer, from Jo Farmer Consulting.

The findings of the evaluation are available below.

• Executive Report - Queensland Mental Health Consumer Representative Peak Establishment Project

How does this support reform?

The establishment of the mental health consumer representative peak organisation aligns with key state and national strategic frameworks, including:

• The Queensland Government’s Shifting minds: Queensland Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs Strategic Plan 2023-2028 – which seeks to ensure that people with lived experience are engaged as equal partners in policy, planning, funding, service delivery and governance;

• Queensland Health’s Better Care Together Plan to 2027– which has a key focus on lived experience engagement, participation and co-design in policy;

• The Queensland Government’s Shifting minds: Queensland Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs Strategic Plan 2018–2023 - which aimed to increase participation of people with lived experience in service planning, design and strategy, including the establishment of a mental health lived experience peak body in Queensland; and

• The Fifth National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan – which states that “consumers and carers should be at the centre of, and enabled to take an active role in shaping, the way in which services are planned, delivered and evaluated”.