Luke Rogers, Trainee Clinical Psychologist
School of Psychology
Faculty of Medical Sciences
What did you do?
LEE (Lived Experienced Exchange) is a group of service users and trainee clinical psychologists who work together to make sure that views and experiences of service users are interwoven into learning and teaching.
Who is involved?
Service users from the local recovery college.
Representatives from each cohort of the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology.
How did you do it?
The group meet up on a monthly basis to talk about different projects and ideas that can increase the voices of service users in teaching on the course. We then work in small subgroups to deliver these projects and come back together to share what we have been working on.
Project example
Recently we have been trying to create videos of lived experience that can be used within teaching. As part of this, some members of LEE will talk about a certain topic area that’s important to them.
For example, we had a service user give us a talk about his experience living with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This was followed by a reflective discussion involving other Service Users and Trainee Psychologists. This talk was recorded and has been uploaded to Canvas for our whole cohort to look at and learn from that experience.
In terms of the wider structure of the group, LEE feeds into the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Sub-Committee. This Committee provides support and can help us progress ideas and initiatives as well as being a good place to go if we have any practical questions about what we are trying to deliver.
Why did you do it?
There’s a real push nationally in the NHS for co-production and collaboration with service users. People are experts of their own experience and while you’ve got a specific set of skills as a psychologist, without the input of service users the support that you offer will not be as meaningful or as useful.
Representation from service users is getting better in teaching but a lot of input does come from professionals so any opportunity to hear more from service users is welcome across the course. LEE provides a great forum for making this happen.
Does it work?
Listening to service users and sharing their experiences is a really positive addition to the course. It can feel removed looking at quotes of people’s experience but when you can hear from someone directly and ask questions it can have a real impact.
Hopefully this will be the first in a host of these videos so when it does go live we can listen to feedback and be responsive to further comments from our cohort.
The feedback from the cohort about similar projects we have completed has been really positive and they feel like these projects add another element to their learning experience.
Contact Details
Luke Wilson-Rogers, Trainee Clinical Psychologist