With Us, For Us at the Scottish Personality Disorder Conference
Our Projects Officer Lesley, provides an update on sharing the learning from With us, For Us, a joint lived experience engagement project with Vox Scotland.
What is With Us, For Us?
With Us, For Us was a project to ensure lived experience engagement in Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s Personality Disorder Programme. The work was developed with a Lived Experience Project Group. The project engaged with a wide range of people who identified with a diagnosis of Personality Disorder. We learned about what people find helpful to their recovery and living well and developed a range of free resources
It has been over a year since the project was completed but that doesn’t mean it sits on a shelf! We are always looking for ways to encourage people and services to use the resources. To think about what they are doing, why and what will be of benefit to people.
What we did
Recently we co-facilitated a workshop at the Scottish Personality Disorder Network Conference in Dundee with Natalie Stevenson, Vox Scotland. We provided an overview of the project and the learning developed, showing what is possible co-designing with participants, and highlighted the experience of people diagnosed with personality disorder and what they wanted to change.
Getting people talking
We followed with an exercise from the With Us, For Us Practice Learning Workbook and were blown away by how quickly participants engaged with the exercise on ‘Compassion, validation and empathy’. Our starting point was people’s own experiences of what helps them through a distressing or emotionally challenging time. Very similar to With Us, For Us findings – we are not that different after all. Then we split into groups to discuss what was working well and what could be different.
What this workshop shows us is that people value the opportunity to discuss their experiences. They weren’t fazed that they were in groups of people who provided and used services as well as carers. It was a great example of experiential learning in action!
Over to you!
At Scottish Recovery Network this chimes with our experiences of working across communities. People often say they don’t have protected time to discuss the what and why of what they do. Given the opportunity, people value it. It encourages reflection, sharing of ideas and builds relationships. So carve out that space!
You can do this as part of your team meeting, lunchtime learning or get adventurous and use the Recovery Conversation Cafe approach to ask the questions and review your service! Need some support or guidance? Get in touch as we are happy to discuss.
Learn more about With Us, For Us and download your free resources from our website.
Scottish Personality Disorder Network are keen to attract new members including people with lived experience.
