Hi, I’m Jodie and I’m a clinical psychologist in training on the University of Liverpool DClin course. I’m currently on a 12 month leadership placement with the PPN NW.

As part of my placement, myself and expert by experience colleagues are leading on a project exploring EBE involvement in the psychological professions training across the NW.

In the PPN NW, we’ve been exploring how best to involve experts by experience in the work we do. We set up an EBE steering group 6 months ago with PPN colleagues and experts by experience and have been meeting monthly to design a model for EBE representation and identify shared aims and objectives that are sustainable over time. Our shared aims include:

1.  To promote the involvement of Experts by Experience in the design & delivery of education & training across the 12 psychological professions.
2. To improve Equality Diversity & Inclusion  (EDI) of Experts by Experience through engagement with local communities and groups across the region
3. To integrate Experts by Experience input into delivery of the PPN NW workplan
4. To support Experts by Experience from the North West of England to participate in regional and national strategic forums.

We wanted to share with you our project plan which we hope will make a start in meeting these shared aims and link to the overall PPN agenda to inform, enable and influence.

We think it is important to gain a better understanding of how EBE involvement is currently being carried out in psychological professions training. We’re interested in people’s examples of good practice as well as any challenges or barriers to involvement that people might encounter in this work. We plan to send out a survey to psychological professions training providers to gain more knowledge about this.

From the responses we receive, we’d like to write a briefing paper (including analysis of the survey results) that can be presented to the PPN more widely.

In conjunction with this, we are hoping to develop an EBE involvement ‘good practice’ event in the coming months, where interested stakeholders can join us for a day of sharing, discussion and developing a community of practice.

We hope this will help to inform policies and guidance in relation to EBE involvement in the psychological professions.

We’d very much like your support so please do get in contact if you have any feedback or queries about our project and share widely with your networks. In addition, you can find out more about it on our project page: (insert web link).

If you would like to complete our survey capturing EBE involvement in training, it is available here: www.nwppn.nhs.uk/our-work/experts-by-experience-involvement-in-psychological-professions-training 

We will be providing monthly updates via this blog (and our webpage) to let you know how we are getting on and answering any questions.

A member of our EBE steering group wanted to say hello and share a little bit about their journey to becoming an Expert by Experience….

Why I Became an EBE (Expert by Experience)

My name is Hilary Tetlow and I am an EBE. I chair the University of Liverpool DClin LExE Group which was formed at the end of 2014 which is when I joined. The first meeting was two days after my mother died from her Alzheimer’s dementia and I had sorted out her funeral and as much of everything else that I could. My brother had finally arrived, and I just wanted to leave Mum’s space so off to the meeting I went. There were many people at the University in one of the large meeting spaces from many community projects in Liverpool. We spent the day talking about what was important to us about psychology and the Doctorate of Psychology practitioners. Those who attended were asked to join a group that would meet monthly at the university. This group became known as LExE (Liverpool Experts by Experience).

Over the last 8 years LExE have become like a mass of roots weaving its way into everything helping to establish a strong tree. I am involved as I want to have influence on the course that produces the Doctors so that service users and carers can get the help they need, hopefully when required.

We started slowly learning about the various parts of the course, Selection, Teaching, Research and Clinical. We became THE CRITICAL FRIEND to the course, and we must have been doing something right as when the course had its BPS accreditation (which included LExE in 2018), LExE was considered outstanding and although we have gone through challenging times the last two years with no face-to-face meetings we have continued to be fully involved and developing new ideas.