Who: Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW), the strategic workforce body for NHS Wales.
The brief: Design and facilitate 7 all-day regional events across Wales (1 in every Local Health Board region, weekly from early June to mid July 2024), to support the HEIW Lived Experience in Mental Health team to launch national guidance on Peer Support and Recovery Colleges, and enable them to build relationships with statutory teams, third sector organisations and groups, and mental health service users in each region.
What I did:
- Designed a session plan through 3 workshops with the Lived Experience in Mental Health team (online and face to face) using a Miro digital whiteboard to map priorities, objectives, outputs and outcomes, and draft the session plan. The session plan provided the structure for the HEIW team to share content, and for participants to build knowledge and relationships through engagement and discussion, including with the HEIW team members.
- Designed and produced the slides, applying the HEIW branding, adjusting the layout of the slides content, and adding the facilitation-specific slides (e.g. how to use Mentimeter to gather views around the room via everyone’s mobile phones) around the HEIW content.
- Designed and produced the monitoring and evaluation resources (e.g. a graph of knowledge vs confidence for participants at the start and the end of the day), and wrote up facilitator script notes for colleagues delivering some of the 7 events across Wales.
- Facilitated the first event (in Newport, 38 attendees) to double-check the design, then briefed colleagues facilitating other regions (Bangor, Brecon and Merthyr Tydfil). Delivered the events in Cardiff (event 3, 76 attendees), Carmarthen (event 5, 30 attendees) and Swansea (event 7, 53 attendees). Coordinated the delivery of the other events with 2 local facilitator colleagues.
- Collated the event notes into regional event summary reports, and summarised the outputs from the 7 regional events into a handover report to be circulated nationally and which would inform new staff about to be recruited into regional Lived Experience coordination roles.
What they said:
“During our time working together on HEIW national events, I was able to learn from and experience Noreen’s skilled facilitation of groups ranging in size and demographic. Noreen is an exceptional facilitator with a remarkable ability to create safe and supportive spaces for inclusive and engaging discussions, particularly in relation to sensitive topics, such as mental health and lived experience. Noreen’s expertise in managing challenging content and contexts is evident in her thoughtful approach, which ensured that complex issues were presented clearly and accessibly.
Noreen possesses an outstanding ability to adapt to diverse audiences and time constraints, consistently delivering quality support throughout our working together. Furthermore, her dedication to creating meaningful experiences for participants is particularly note-worthy, ensuring each activity was impactful in how it supported overall aims and engagement. Noreen’s contributions to shaping our events over the last few months have been invaluable and greatly appreciated.”
~ Alex Congreve, Co-production Lead for Lived Experience, HEIW
“I became curious about your work as a facilitator/co-producer and the deep and important thinking behind it all. Certainly that was reflected throughout the event at the Park Plaza, I was extremely impressed by how it all went and thoroughly enjoyed it. You kept it flowing beautifully and having read about the core ethics and values you work to, I could clearly see they were brought into play throughout the sessions.”
~ Shell Griffin, participant (HEIW regional Lived Experience event, Cardiff)
Summary graph from the 7 events, showing a cloud of red dots (captured at the start of the events) and green dots (captured at the end of the events), with a larger red dot showing the average of all events, and likewise for green.
The axes of the graph are people’s understanding of the value lived experience in mental health, and their confidence in working with lived experience in mental health.
The green dot (at the end) is higher and further along than the red dot (at the start), indicating a slighth increase in understanding and a large increase in confidence.