The Participation nEXus is a place for community and patients to collaborate with researchers, industry and government for healthcare design, delivery, education and improvement. It is a point of intersection across the University for people working in partnership with patients and healthcare professionals. We work to ensure that experience is at the heart of healthcare system design, delivery, education and transformation. This is achieved through active research partnerships with people who are experts in their health (patients and carers where appropriate), the community (representing professionals, government and non-government agencies committed to patient involvement), and industry bodies. Our goal is for people to be at the heart of medicine and health systems using co-design for health transformation.
Our work is premised on people with lived-experience at the centre of operations and activities. We do this by working with participants in our Co-Design Living Labs research registry. The research registry is 1000+ member group of people who have experience of mental and physical health conditions. Our aim to is to ensure individual, organisational and system change and, most importantly, improvements to health outcomes. We do this by using the most suitable participatory methods to the problem at hand—co-design for tools and prototypes, technologies and interventions, co-production of knowledge outputs for example contributing to policy briefs, research papers and presentations, development of the epatient-eprofessional model (empowered and engaged patients & enabled professionals) for education and improvement.
We collaborate to produce effective change in current delivery and the future workforce, and a human-centred, experience-based healthcare system.
Examples of our work include:
- Our lived-experience participants from the Co-Design Living Labs worked with the New South Wales Health Agency for Clinical Innovation to provide input for A Guide to Build Co-design Capability: xperience participants from the Co-Design Living Labs worked with the New South Wales Health Agency for Clinical Innovation to provide input for A Guide to Build Co-design Capability: https://www.aci.health.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/502240/Guide-Build-Codesign-Capability.pdf
- We deliver training for co-design in research and translation to health organisations and networks to build capabilities in co-design and participatory models.
- We deliver capabilities development for epatients—empowered and engaged patients—to partner with our Melbourne Medical School educators to improve knowledge and understanding of patient experience and create the foundations for the enabled professional.
- We develop navigator models for experiential studies, research and education programs.
- We host regular co-design living labs for research design, intervention development and testing, implementation, evaluation and translation.
GET IN TOUCH
We welcome your interest in The Participation nEXus.
If you want to know more, or explore opportunities for collaboration, please contact the Head of the Participation nEXUS, Associate Professor Victoria Palmer in the Department of General Practice, Melbourne Medical School, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne.