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About Easy Read
Easier words with pictures to help explain some ideas.
What is Our Health Space?
Our Health Space is a place to:
- find health information
- share ideas
- share stories
- share knowledge
- learn from each other
What is co-design?
Co-design means people work together to make something.
This means people with intellectual disability help make choices from the start.
Families, carers, support people, health professionals, and researchers help too.
The Advisory Group
The Advisory Group started in August 2024.
The group helps guide the work.
It has more than 50 members from across Australia.
The group includes:
- people with intellectual disability
- families, carers, and support people
- people from self-advocacy groups
- people from disability services
- health and disability workers
- people from government
- researchers and university staff
Members have different lives and experiences.
What Our Health Space should do
People have said Our Health Space should be more than a place to read facts.
It should:
- help people connect
- value lived experience
- feel safe and trusted
- help people learn from each other
Join the Advisory Group
We are still working on Our Health Space.
You can join the Advisory Group.
You can email ourhealthspace@unsw.edu.au
or call +61 2 9065 8076.
Co-design means working together with the people who will use services, information or resources to: For example, people with intellectual disability and health professionals could co-design a health resource. They could share ideas, experiences and feedback to make sure the resource is: means people work together to make something.
For Our Health Space, this means people with intellectual disability help shape the work from the start.
It also means families, carers, support people, health workers, and researchers help shape the work too.
Our Health Space is not just a website. It is a place to:
- find health information
- share ideas, stories, and knowledge.
The people at the Centre knew this work needed strong co-design.
They did not want to build a website first and ask people what they thought about it later. They wanted people to be part of the work from the start.
That is why the Advisory Group was formed in August 2024. The Advisory Group is a key part of the co-design story.
The Advisory Group
The Advisory Group has over 50 members from across Australia. It includes:
- people with intellectual disability
- families, carers, and support people
- people from self-advocacy groups
- people from disability services
- health and disability professionals
- people from government
- researchers and people from universities.
These members bring different skills and knowledge to the group. They also bring their own life experience. This helps the group think about health in many different ways.
The group brings many different life stories. Members have different experiences. Some members:
- live in cities
- live in regional or remote places
- are people
First Nations people are the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia. They are the first peoples of this land.
- are from different cultures
- are
LGBTQIA+ means people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and asexual. The plus (+) means that it could include more people too. LGBTQIA+ is a short way to talk about people with different genders, bodies and relationships.
- have complex support needs.
It is important that the Advisory Group has many different ways to be involved. People can choose how they take part.
The group works in different ways:
- Sometimes the group meets online, other times in person.
- Sometimes there are workshops or focus groups.
- Sometimes members test ideas and designs.
- Sometimes in big groups or sometimes in small groups.
Co-design needs to be flexible and people need different ways to have a say.
Learning about what Our Health Space should be like
Members share ideas about what Our Health Space should be like:
- They share ideas about how it should work.
- They talk about what health information people need.
- They give advice about how the site can be easy to use.
- They help think about how people can share knowledge.
- They also help think about how we can know if Our Health Space is working well.
People have also said Our Health Space should be more than a place to read facts. It should:
- help people connect
- value lived experience
- feel safe and trusted
- support people to learn from each other.
We are still working on Our Health Space. If you want to join the Advisory Group, you can send an email to ourhealthspace@unsw.edu.au.
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