cohealth is a not-for-profit community organisation that provides essential health services in Melbourne’s CBD, and northern and western suburbs. Part of what distinguishes cohealth is its commitment to working with communities and to making people feel safe and included. In response to gaps in their understanding of client experiences and to encourage greater community voices, cohealth commissioned Capire to research ‘client voice’ models.
The intention was to inform the organisational processes and decisions to enable cohealth to better embed client voice across the organisation, from governance to operations. This included helping cohealth to determine:
Objectives
The objectives included reviewing case studies and documents, and interviewing key stakeholders, to understand what similar organisations are doing, and how they define, hear and incorporate client voice.
Other objectives included identifying practical application of client voice models; exploring emerging trends; identifying challenges in developing and applying models; and understanding the cultural context and systemic levers that support implementation of client voice models.
We also explored remuneration practices for lived experience participants, payment processes, minimum wage requirement limitations, and linkages with Centrelink support.
Outputs
Capire’s research paper ‘Hearing Client Voices’ provides a summary of eight interviews and 12 documents reviewed. It includes a review of the terminology used in other contexts as well as terminology recommendations. It also provides a list of key actions and suggestions on topics including:
