Embedding lived and living experience expertise into suicide-prevention training requires a fundamental structural shift, one where peer workers are no longer positioned as “just storytellers,” but recognised as leaders, educators and designers of the systems that shape how suicide prevention is taught and understood.
This presentation examines how the Health Education and Training Institute (HETI) is embedding lived and living experience across curriculum design, facilitation and evaluation to strengthen both the NSW Health Peer Workforce and the broader suicide-prevention workforce.
It highlights the movement from symbolic inclusion toward genuine leadership and partnership, ensuring lived experience is not only heard but actively shapes the future of suicide-prevention and mental-health education. The work is grounded in the presenter’s pioneering lived and living experience educator leadership role, responsible for developing and delivering peer-workforce training across NSW Health.
A central vision underpinning this work is the belief that suicide prevention is most effective when all sectors operate from a shared understanding, unified purpose and coordinated action.
This aligns directly with NSW’s whole-of-government suicide-prevention reform agenda, which requires integrated responses across Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) services, aftercare, Zero Suicides in Care (ZSIC), Peer Supported Transfer of Care (PSTOC), Suicide Prevention Outreach Teams (SPOT), Safe Havens and wider community systems.
Within this model, unity is expressed through multidisciplinary training design and delivery, and through cross-sector alignment across services that respond to people experiencing suicidal distress.
Peer-led education plays a critical role in building this shared understanding. It strengthens collaboration across disciplines and supports more consistent, compassionate responses to distress. It is particularly vital for people with lived experience stepping into peer roles in high-intensity environments.
Structured, lived-experience-led training enables peer workers to move beyond storytelling alone and develop the skills, boundaries and reflective practice required to work safely and sustainably within health services.
Key elements of the Peer Workforce training include purposeful storytelling, reflective peer work supervision and orientation.
Authentic collaboration has been strengthened through the establishment of the first Lived and Living Experience Peer Workforce Educator Lead role, combining lived experience expertise with educator capability to enhance training design, implementation and evaluation.
Close partnership between the Ministry of Health and HETI reflects a shared commitment to improving mental health and reducing lives lost to suicide.
This presentation demonstrates that suicide-prevention outcomes are strengthened when lived and living experience is positioned as a leadership capability that shapes how systems learn, teach and evolve.