The OT Mental Health Consumer Co-Delivered Curriculum is a partnership between ACU's Occupational Therapy program and an independent team of mental health consumer educators and advocates. "Mental Health Consumers" are community members with lived experience of mental illness, whose expertise is shaped by recovery and engagement with mental health services. The partnership centres on co-producing the mental health curriculum within the Bachelor of Occupational Therapy, with consumer educators contributing to the design, delivery, and evaluation of teaching and learning, including assessment.
More recently, the collaboration has extended to a mental health simulated placement, where consumer educators work alongside occupational therapy practitioners to mentor students across the placement, providing briefing, guidance and debriefing for each activity.
The partnership has been active since 2013 and reaches approximately 350students per year across Brisbane, North Sydney, Melbourne, Ballarat and Canberra campuses through two units: OTHY205 Mental Health Recovery in Occupational Therapy 1 and OTHY301 Mental Health Recovery in Occupational Therapy 2.
The partnership has also extended into a collaborative program of research. This includes work examining the impact of consumer educator involvement in teaching, such as whether the inclusion of a mental health consumer as a co-assessor in an oral assessment influences student engagement, anxiety and academic performance, and whether students who learn with consumer educators demonstrate higher levels of empathy compared with those taught by occupational therapy academics.
The collaboration has also supported Honours research, with consumer educators contributing as members of supervision teams. These projects have explored consumer perspectives of mental health service delivery, including qualitative studies of the strengths model of case management and person-centred multidisciplinary care planning within an Australian inpatient mental health rehabilitation setting.
Occupational therapy students need more than clinical knowledge to work effectively in mental health settings. Hearing directly from people with lived experience helps students develop empathy, challenge assumptions, and build the relational and reflective skills needed for person-centred, recovery-oriented practice. By embedding consumer educators in curriculum design, teaching, assessment and simulation, the project models authentic partnership and demonstrates how lived experience expertise strengthens both education and service delivery.
This matters not only for student learning, but for the future of mental health practice. Programs developed with communities, rather than for them, are more responsive to real needs and more likely to create lasting change.
active, making it one of ACU's longest-running community partnerships
students engaged each year across five ACU campuses
in ACU and FHS Learning and Teaching Grants between 2014 and 2023
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