Posted on: 21 July 2023
CNWL welcomed peer support workers from across the country to the NHS Lived Experience National Conference on 20 July.
Held at ISH Venues on Great Portland Street and with a theme of Ancient Approaches in Modern Healthcare, speakers explored how lived experience has changed over its long history.
Opening the conference was Fiona Kuhn-Thompson, who thanked everyone in attendance and reiterated the importance of lived experience work within medical practice.
Fiona then asked each of the attendees to enter their role in the NHS into a Mentimeter, highlighting how live experience work has so many different names.
“Just look,” she said. “You cannot pin us down in one title.
She then welcomed Survivor Researcher, Alison Faulkner, to the stage as the first keynote speaker.
Alison told a brief history of lived experience and peer support work, from 18th Century French Physician Philippe Pinel to the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 to modern research and practice.
“Those transformational experiences of finding someone who has experienced the same thing as someone is very important to people,” Alison said, expressing great joy in how many of these spaces and communities have been made more accessible through the internet and social media.
Alison further explained that peer support work is “not about making more efficient systems”, but more about “creating dialogues that have an influence on our understanding”.
She encouraged listeners to celebrate and encourage spontaneous communities built around shared experiences and hardships.
After a short break, participants broke away into different sessions, exploring the following topics:
- Where Open Dialogue and Lived Experience Meet - Rai Waddingham, Open Dialogue Practitioner
- Supporting Artists with Lived Experience and Art as Protest - Daniel Regan, Executive Director of the Arts & Health Hub
- Restorative Approaches to Harm in Mental Health Systems - Tam Martin Fowles, Founding Director/CEO, Hope in the Hearth CIC and Professor Hel Spandler, Professor of Mental Health, University of Central Lancashire
- Providing Peer Support to Neurodivergent Black Women and Non-Binary People - Vivienne Isebor, ADHD Babes
Following lunch, there were further parallel sessions, empowering the conference with talks such as:
- The Histories of our Predecessors - Mark Brown, Social Spider CIC
- What do Peer Support Workers do - Vikki Price, Peer Hub CIC
- Mad Studies - Knowledge is Power - Ms Tamar Jeynes, Pink Sky Thinking
- Activism in Trans Healthcare - Dr Ev Callahan, University College London
We then heard from our second Keynote speaker, Mel Ball, who discussed her think-piece on what a peer-support career pathway could look like in the NHS.
Mel explained how peer support should enrich pre-existing clinical services, not replace them.
She went on to give an outline of how one may be able to progress from working as an entry-level peer support worker (PSW) to a senior PSW and beyond.
She ended by discussing the potential work of PSWs with reference to the “Four Pillars of Practice” and the specialist roles that may be created.
“We’ve got a huge job out there and I hope Lived Experience Directors can start to attend to some of these issues.”
Fiona then retook the stage to close the conference with a short film by CNWL, which described how the CNWL’s LXP and PSW teams have developed over almost 10 years.