Lived Experience
Lived experience expertise is the unique wisdom gained through directly experiencing and building a life when faced with significant life impacting challenges. While it’s true that everyone has some experiences of distress and adversity, not everyone experiences significant challenges that take their lives in an entirely new direction, such as many people with mental health challenges, social exclusion, disability, or homelessness face. Lived Experience expertise complements clinical, professional and academic knowledge in shaping services and policies, and is applied in policy development, research, service design and delivery.
Lived Experience Awareness Day
The inaugural Lived Experience Awareness day event hosted by the Department of Health is to take place on 15th October 2025.
For a number of years now, the inclusion of Lived Experience expertise through a service improvement partnership approach has been prioritised to ensure quality, rights and evidenced based delivery of health services in an accountable manner. The establishment of the Central Office of Patient and Public Partnership has been key to this, and significant examples of partnership with patient and Lived Experience expertise is evident in Mental Health, Social Inclusion, Housing and Disability. This is expected to be expanded to all health care domains through the work of the Patient Partnership office and peer work in the coming years.
The need to acknowledge and celebrate this development and integration of lived experience into systems and to support its further expansion has been a growing call of Lived Experience and patient experts. The Strengthening Lived Experience Steering group (HSE, Housing Agency, Genio), in consultation with key stakeholders, have decided to establish a national Lived Experience Awareness Day to meet this need and promote the concept of lived experience expertise.
For more information:
National Lived Experience Day Information Sheet (PDF, size 146.7 KB, 1 page)
