“The solutions are in our communities” – What does it take to strengthen community engagement (in the Australian context)?

Why are you conducting a workshop? By definition, integrated care takes a person-centred and community-driven approach to service delivery, proclaiming to involve people on all levels of the system and from co-design to evaluation. Yet good practices where people with lived experience, their families and caregivers as well as the wider communities are actively and meaningfully engaged in the decision making, design and delivery of services are few and far between. The barriers are manifold, from organisational and professional cultures not recognising the value of participation, to professionals, managers, decisionmakers and researcher not knowing how to involve their communities, and resources and structures not being in place to actually support meaningful and continuous engagement. On the other hand there is a whole host of citizen leaders, consumer advocates and disruptors who demonstrate on a daily basis that it is possible against all odds. How much better could it be, if we all actually worked together? This workshop will provide a platform to explore the concept of community involvement and co-design, discuss good and bad experiences, discover practical tools for implementation and formulate recommendations for the Australian context of how this topic can be taken forward.

Who is it for? This workshop is for consumers, professionals, researchers and decision makers.

What are you going to do? The workshop will use a combination of presentations, world café and plenary discussions to exchange knowledge and experiences and come to a common understanding. The proposed schedule is as follows:

15’ Welcome, setting the scene and introduction of core concepts

45’ World Café Rounds 1-3

20’ Reporting to the plenary and discussion of key messages and recommendations

10’ Summary and concluding remarks

Key questions and topics to be discussed are:

• Why is consumer engagement so important? What is the impact? How do we convince people to promote it?

• What support structures need to be put in place on which level to enable sustainable consumer engagement?

• What competences are necessary/education and training? For whom?

• How do we ensure inclusiveness and diversity?

How are you going to summarize the take home messages? The last round of the World Café and the following discussions will summarise recommendations and actions to be taken forward. The results will be written up as a perspectives paper or blog.