Lived Experience Partners at the HIN

In 2022, the Health Innovation Network (HIN) South London launched its first Involvement Strategy, designed to support our ambition to consistently and meaningfully involve patients, service users, carers, people and communities in our work to improve health and care.

One of the cornerstones of this approach was the recruitment of two Lived Experience Partners – part-time staff with highly specialised expertise in involvement. Our first two Lived Experience Partners, Faith Smith and Aurora Todisco, played an important role in shaping engagement, co-design and co-production activities across dozens of projects at the HIN and thousands of contributions from the communities we serve.

Some of their activities included:

· Guiding the co-design of a new set of online cancer resources for people with serious mental illness. More than 70 people with lived experience contributed to the resources, which have been used thousands of times since launch.

· Using Experience-Based Co-Design methodology to bring together staff and patients to co-design recommendations to improve experience of care around Pulmonary Rehabilitation and Mental Health.

· Championing the importance of lived experience and sharing best practice across the sector through representing the HIN at national conferences and writing articles in leading publications.

In 2025, Dale Taylor-Gentles and Kreena Dhiman became the HIN’s new Lived Experience Partners. Using their involvement skills, local engagement networks and their own personal experiences of the health and care system, they are already working closely with programme and stakeholder teams to design and deliver successful involvement work. They will also play an important role in shaping our next long-term Involvement Strategy.