Many higher education courses train students on topics that relate to and will potentially impact the lived experience of many different group of people, yet these stakeholders are rarely involved in the design, delivery or assessment of the syllabus. The teaching on these courses is often enriched by the contribution of practitioners, however it’s more unusual for the end service users or those with lived experience of a topic to be directly involved. Case studies are often presented to students, sometimes based on real experience, but how often do the stakeholders themselves deliver this information?

The importance of lived experience is acknowledged in healthcare evaluation and research, where Patient and Public Engagement (PPI) has become an essential component and requirement for health research funding. It is also a requirement for health and social care practitioner training in several countries, but this can often be relatively superficial, and even tokenistic. In this paper, we will present a case study and evaluation of a module co-creation with lived experience experts. The project involved the co-creation of a final year University undergraduate neuropsychology module within the Psychology programme at the University of Westminster in London, UK. Partners in the process were students, academic staff, local specialist brain injury charities and brain injury survivors. Following a year-on-year iterative process, the module has gone from inviting survivors to share their lived experience to co-creating teaching resources, authentic assessment materials and teaching. We will present the project methods and findings, and some of the concrete outputs the project generated.

Bringing experts into the classroom has been shown to enhance a range of student soft skills, including compassion, communication and professional skills but our research found that the experts by lived experience equally gained from the experience, including a feeling of empowerment, raised self-esteem and self-worth and they really valued the opportunity to do public speaking and to educate others.

We will therefore propose that the inclusion of lived experience should be extended to all areas of higher education where it’s applicable, where any curricula relating to specific groups of people should include representatives in the curriculum design and delivery.

Keywords: Lived experience, curriculum design, psychology, patient and public involvement, undergraduate.