David O’Brien

Tell us what you feel passionate about and why?

I feel passionate about social change, justice, human rights for all including prisoners, poverty,

mindfulness and equality. I feel passionate about respect, dignity and empowering people,

communities and professionals to give their best to one another, to play to their own and others

strengths and to be mindful and comfortable with themselves and others. I feel passionate about

working in partnership with professionals in health, care and the wider public sector to make a

difference, to improve services, to transform systems and change lives. ALONE we cannot make

the changes, TOGETHER with the professionals, we can. I want to transform healthcare by playing

my part in Devolution Greater Manchester, I want to be one of the lived experience members of the

EDC so together with the system leaders, we can promote equality, diversity and human rights in

healthcare so it simply becomes ‘what we do’ WITH communities, not what we talk about or do TO communities. I want to highlight that the current public sector service cuts are damaging to service

users, families and communities and to the professionals. I believe that the recent welfare reforms

would not have got through an Equality Impact assessment if the EDC had carried one out on

them. The Cardiff Heath Board, Wales are asking; ‘to HIA (health impact assess) or not to HIA for welfare reform?..that is the question. I want to be part of the EDC and hope we can look at

how communities can build their own assets and be resilient so the service cuts don’t do more

damage. Even with the pressure on budgets, I believe we can work together with the professionals

so the system can take a humane approach. Cost reductions through benefit sanctions coupled

with DWP food-bank vouchers won’t save money in the long run. We need to move away from the

‘bedroom tax’ as a ‘cash cow’ and have a sensible conversation about stemming spiralling

healthcare costs and meeting unmet demand by tapping into community assets and taking ‘people-

powered’ approaches to health and wellbeing.

I feel passionate about the recovery movement for addiction and mental health issues and its

mantra ‘I alone can do it, I can’t do it alone’. Change must come from within. Change your

thoughts, change your life, however you cannot transform yourself, your community or OUR NHS

alone. You recover IN COMMUNITY with others, IN PARTNERSHIP with peer advocates and

professionals.

Some of us are ‘in recovery’. All of us can be ‘in discovery’. Mark Gilman, the national Czar for

Recovery PHE, has now started the ‘Discovery Movement’! This is relevant for me as an

applicant to be a lived experience member of EDC because I want to support and promote the

EDC developing policies and services for ALL (especially all protected groups and those who are

marginalised and disadvantaged ) not just for people like me. The recovery movement is based on

30 years of research, policy and practice about how people recover from behaviours and lifestyles

that were killing them. Recovery could suggest there was a time and a place to go back to when all

was well, however many of us have lived all our lives in financial, educational, cultural and

emotional poverty. We have grown up surrounded by poor health and wellbeing. Poor health and

wellbeing is the norm.

The journey to health and wellbeing needs to be a Voyage of Discovery for all.To coin a

phrase, I am applying for a lived experience position at the EDC because I want to be part of ‘the

solution’. As Dr Ruth Hussey, former Regional Director of Public Health in the North West said

when she awarded us our mindfulness certificates at that very first Department of Health pilot in

2011, ‘let’s replace the I in Illness with the WE in Wellness.!’

I feel passionate about transforming the healthcare system together. We need to change focus. It

cannot be done without changing the lens on the camera. We need to work with the professionals

so people move from being ‘hard to reach’, ‘challenging’, ‘none-compliant’ ‘complex’ and

whatever other label we put on them to being partners in their own health and care, partners in

change, and this is what asset based community development (ABCD) can bring to the table of

health and care. I feel passionate about enjoying life. The NHS needs an entertainment manager.

We all need to lighten up. We need to work with humour which isn’t based on reducing or belittling

others. Have you ever tried laughter therapy? It’s amazing and it also boosts the immune system.

Less drugs, more belly laughs.

I want to co-produce training WITH professionals and FOR professionals and patients. I want to

put the public back into public health so that those who are most disadvantaged, most

marginalised and those from protected groups can transform their OWN health in partnership with

health professionals and have services built around their assets, strengths and needs.

Tell us about your lived experience?

I was born on the pavement outside a Manchester pub- so you can be certain that I am literally

‘coming up from the streets’ ! I am proud of my lived experience and see myself as a survivor in

many ways. One of my mentors says she will get me a blue plaque on the pub wall or have it

embedded in the York paving stone! My mother drank heavily when she was pregnant with me and

the ambulance didn’t get their quick enough when she finally realised she was in labour. I had a

ruthless, violent, alcoholic father and I learned not to cry just to show him he wasn’t ’getting to me’.

He died of shame, too embarrassed to undergo examinations and tests for colon cancer.

When my father passed away I learned that he was born illegitimate to an Irish Catholic teacher in

Tiperary who chose not to disclose who the father of her child was. My father had pretended all his

life that he was one of a large family of brothers who lived in Southern Ireland and later emigrated

to America. All lies, all shame, all about feeling unworthy, all about continuing the cycle of violence

and neglect of your children. Bringing up children, even from a distance, is the most difficult thing I

have done but I have managed to break that cycle and have provided as best I could for my own

children and have never ever been physically or emotionally violent towards them.

My lived experience has much pain, abuse and negativity in it but I have managed to turn that around and create a strength base for myself. I can help EDC professionals to see how this approach can work for me it can work for all using ABCD! Together we can strengthen the NHS.

As a child I survived by being a runaway, a truant and a thief. I also used to steal on demand from

gas meters in the local area for my mother. I progressed onto parking meters and beyond. I take

full responsibility for the anti-social things I have done in my past and I don’t want to paint a picture

of me as an innocent victim of life’s circumstance however to an extent, I was a ‘manufactured thug’, My early lessons in violence were sadly reinforced by the correctional training schooling

system. At 18 I was described in the gutter press as ‘Britain’s worst Football Hooligan’, I graduated

from Borstal into prison and onto thirty-four years of daily drug use and dealing. At the age of 52, I

began my journey from drug use towards recovery and have ever since acted as a mentor to

people in the early stages of recovery. I now contribute lived experience to health-related research

and service redesign. And I am an honorary researcher at the University of Manchester and I have

presented at national conferences on prison health, offender wellbeing, recovery, sustainability in

healthcare and mindfulness. My blue ‘pathway’ diagram shows some of the highlights of

my volunteering work. Through my lived experience I feel able to understand the lived experience

of others from protected groups and living in challenging circumstances. If chosen to be an EDC

lived experience member I would make sure I keep up to date with all types of lived experience so I

am not going to the EDC just concentrating on people like me. I would like to be a member of the

lived experience and inclusion health sub group that was discussed at the EDC because then I will

get to hear about the statistics and the research done on other groups and I can make sure the

Equality and Diversity Council know how important it is for them to support all the inclusion health

groups and improve their health, healthcare and access to services.

Can you tell us about which local Values group you have been involved in, since when and what has been your contribution to it?

I have made a power-point about what work I have done for the Greater Manchester Values Group

and beyond. I would like to thank Iman Rafatmah, my lived experience friend and colleague for his

technical assistance. I hope this helps to show you what I have contributed to the Values group

and the recovery and lived experience agenda. This is important as we can’t just focus on what we

have done in the group. You need to know how you can build on our other valuable volunteering

work to know what we can bring to the Equality and Diversity Council.

I have enclosed a copy of my blue ‘Pathway’ diagram. This is something my DWP mentor first

suggested I do. I keep it updated as I get involved in more volunteering. It shows how I went into

recovery and was referred by Greater Manchester West to join the DH Mindfulness and

Worklessness Pilot in 2011. I was lucky enough to collect a few mentors and coaches along the

way such as Tom Hennell who has a brain the size of a planet. He helped me and I helped him

develop his theory of “Living Ill Better”; he acknowledges me when he presents this at national

conferences. I also had help from a Grenville Page who introduced me to a group of civil servants

and some of them were working on flexible payment regimes at DWP. I inspired Grenville to leave

the civil service and join the voluntary sector. I hope he can still pay his bills! I joined the expert by

experience policy collaborative and that is when I saw the power of how I could use my lived

experience to help policy makers who were writing policy without knowing much about the lives of

the service users they were writing it for. Through my NHS mentor Ruth Passman, I have

experienced rapid ageing. I am only 30 but have been worn out by constant demands to attend

meetings, learn new things and so on. It’s been a great journey. This all links to Asset based health

and my great friend and colleague Mark Gilman. I have been active in the UK Recovery Walks in

Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester where I ran a Recovery Boat and delivered mindfulness and

recovery support. In 2011 I was asked by Mark to do a Sunday Times interview with the Chief

Executive of the National Treatment Agency. As you will see, this was to launch the new Drugs

Strategy and to send a message about how important recovery and peer led recovery is. I got

mindfulness a mention too! I was approached by Nagina in the NHS England Public Patient Voice

team and I set up a mindfulness and wellbeing stall at the Leeds Values Summit with lived

experience champions. I also was filmed on the day (autographs later) and spoke at the workshop

on social value with all the system leaders. One Values Summit led to another. And another. And

another. I volunteered at the London Summit and set up the Manchester summit. We worked all

the day before to make sure it was a great summit and I was a keynote speaker alongside Mark

Gilman and ran a workshop on recovery also. We set up the Greater Manchester Values group and

have been working on many priorities. JSNAs, end of life care, access to services, homelessness,

migrant health, poverty, debt, welfare reforms and food banks. We presented all our work at the

Expo and we are planning to take it by storm again this year. We have helped John, Vijay and

Aman in the Leeds network. Together WE CAN.

I am amazed to look at the pathway diagram and see my journey from Children’s Homes, Borstal

and Strangeways to the University of Manchester and to being a national speaker and a local

community activist. I hope to be a Lived Experience member of the EDC and represent the Greater

Manchester Values Group. I have also charted some of the qualifications I have now achieved

which will help me in this role. I have my foundational qualification from MMU in coach-mentoring.

My Foundational Diploma in Emotional Therapeutic Counselling. I am a fully qualified mindfulness

teacher and I am setting up a Centre for Community Mindfulness so lived experience teachers like

me, Carl, Natasha, Kevin and Stewart can bring mindfulness to the world of recovery and into

prisons. I am very proud of the work I have done since I became a member of the North West

People in Research Forum – established and funded by the NHS. I have become an honorary

researcher and staff member at the University of Manchester, helping clinical psychologists to

design and deliver suicide prevention initiative sin prisons in a way that is effective ad is safe for

them and the prisoners. I have delivered lectures to first year psychologists also so they get to see

what kind of lived experience they will meet in their clinics and how they can understand more

about the lives of their patients. I am now involved in a new research project called INSITE which is

looking at prescribing and other complementary and appropriate interventions for mental health in-

patients with complex needs and dual diagnosis. I mention all of this as it is part of that richness

that I , alongside others, bring to the Values Group and we keep each other informed of what is

going on in our areas of volunteering or work.

How do you think the NHS should improve to meet the diverse needs of all its communities?

Simple. Asset Based Health.

The NHS is for everyone irrespective of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion,

belief, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity or marital or civil partnership status. The

NHS has legal and moral duties to to promote equality and reduce health inequalities. It must pay

particular attention to groups or sections of society where improvements in health and life

expectancy are not keeping pace with the rest of the population. That means listening up to all the

people of lived experience and all the patients groups when they tell the NHS that they have not

received services delivered with respect, dignity and compassion or they have had poor care. We

have a bold NHS Chief Executive. He has championed the Workforce Race Equality Standard. He

has supported and agreed to Lived Experience members joining the EDC. The NHS needs to seize

this opportunity for Equality as it will help us transform NHS care.

We need People Powered health. The NHS should support individuals to promote and manage

their own health. NHS services must be tailored to the needs and of patients, carers, families and

communities who must be fully involved in and consulted on all decisions about their care and

treatment.

We can deliver improvements in health and wellbeing by co-producing the serviceswith the

community. Patients must come first in everything the NHS does and must be treated with respect

and dignity. I have attended workshops on human rights in healthcare and have spoken about

human rights breaches in prions and with the care of older people. The NHS needs to get better at

valuing and respecting the different needs, aspirations and priorities that patients and their carers

and families have, and must properly take them into account when designing and delivering

services, regardless of what protected group or area they come from. Staff can be invisible patients

– who cares for the care givers?

The NHS needs to listen to people of lived experience. It needs to co-design and co-deliver training

to staff and patients. I have received uncompassionate and disrespectful healthcare in prison and

in A&E when I have accidentally overdosed. Compassionate care means valuing everyone. The

NHS can tap into the assets of its communities so people can be partners in their own care to

improve the health and wellbeing of patients, communities and its staff.

At Expo and at the Leeds, London and Manchester Values Summit we heard about the values that

are enshrined in the NHS constitution and also the five year forward view. We have a great chance

to improve NHS services and promote equality and tackllng health inequalities in access to,

experience of and outcomes from health and care services through our lived experience

membership of the EDC..

At Expo we talked in the End of Life workshop about ‘bearing witness’ and we heard in the access

to healthcare workshops from those with alcohol and drug addiction issues as well as the homeless

and destitute. Here professionals and people with lived experience were able to talk openly and

honestly and to explore solutions of how to address these issues through co-producing policy –

professionals and lived experience together. We have so many innovative good practice

exemplars such as the open registration policy and excellent primary care provided by the Urban

Village Medical Practice in Ancoats, Manchester. Lets use them and industrialise this across the

NHS.

Tell us about your listening skills and how you can present what you learn concisely to others.

I often play a ‘bridging’ or ‘translating’ role between people in my community and public services.

When I meet the parents on my estate who are struggling with supporting teenage children who

are in trouble and when I speak with older ex-offenders who have mental and emotional health

needs, addiction and debt issues and relationship problems, my listening skills have to be second

to none. Most of these men and women have no trust in authority, are suspicious of professionals,

are not in touch with or fall from the very margins of services and I have to listen actively, build and

earn trust through being present, sympathetic, supportive and empathetic. In the world of addiction

and recovery, I sometimes have an opportunity of just a matter of minutes to communicate in a way

that shows I hail from their world and can be trusted, I have experienced similar problems to them

and have come through with professional help. It is vital that am a ‘trusted broker’ and get the

message across that we NEED professionals. I have to be able to communicate what I have

learned about accessing services, choosing the right moment to signpost community members to

peer support and any mainstream services that are geared up to meet their needs. I feel I could

communicate well at EDC, playing a ‘translating’ and ‘bridging’ role between people of lived

experience, the professionals and the system leaders.

I have become skilled in presenting what I have learned through my lived experience. I am a

naturally communicative and talkative person and over the last year, I have been studying

techniques to select my main points or distil them so that when in a large meeting or a group,

everyone gets ‘air time’. I have recently asked for the help of a mentor who is a clinical

psychologist to develop my listening and communication skills to a higher level. I think this will be

really helpful. Watch this space! Two years ago, I attended a ‘Making an Impact’ course run by

actors and voice coaches and I would love to do some more work like this with other people of

lived experience, training alongside professionals again. One exercise from the training that I still

use is ‘the elevator pitch’. You practice distilling your message into 60 seconds. That can be your

own ‘pitch’- who you are, what you do and what you are passionate about, or it can be a ‘pitch’ for

the project or policy you are promoting at that time.

I have had to learn to communicate concisely and powerfully in mentoring relationships with

academics, policy makers and public servants and when speaking at local and national

conferences and events. I have presented what I have learned about mindfulness, recovery,

violence prevention and the prevention of suicide in prisons to audiences ranging from local

support groups to the Chief Executive of the NHS (past and present) and of course to the Advisory

or steering groups that I sit on. I gained my foundational qualification in Emotional Therapeutic

counselling which provided training in active and empathetic listening when working with people in

distress. How to ‘hold’ the situation safely and confidently. This has helped me with my listening

skills.

What skills and training you think you need to meet the needs of this role?

I would like support to do a skills and training audit so I can be fully aware of what gaps I have,

however I would like training in leadership, in advanced communication and presentational skills

and in writing reports. I would like training in cultural competency so I can gain more knowledge of

and confidence in working with diversity. I have a teenage son with an ex-partner who is a gypsy/

traveller and I would like to receive training so I can better understand how to be a support

advocate for my son and his community and I have agreed work with the Traveller Movement and

with Dr Vijay Kumar, GP to the gypsy –traveller community and a member of the Leeds Values

network so I can help support traveller communities in tackling the health, social and housing

issues that they face.

Can you commit to participating in EDC pre-meetings and de-briefing sessions.? Will you feed back to your values group or network from the EDC after each session? Yes. If

successful, I am really looking forward to preparing together with a group of people of lived

experience prior to the EDC meetings We have been told that we will get the papers a week before

the meeting which gives us the opportunity to digest them, ask any questions we may have and

prepare for our participation nt he Council meeting. The de-bref and feedback meetings will help us

to be strategic in how we bring a lived experience approach to the Council and to ensure that not

just the values group we are a member of but the other groups and networks are kept informed and

involved.

What do you understand by the Nolan principles of public life (selflessness, objectivity, integrity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership)

In the criminal underworld we had our own leaders, our own sense of honour, principles and a

skewed code of conduct which we would live or die by. Looking back, I cared passionately about

having ‘honesty amongst villains’, being able to trust those I worked closely with, having their back,

acting selflessly at times to protect and support them. I was ruthless if I thought someone had

crossed the line with me. I often sorted out bullying that I saw in prisons. I couldn’t see vulnerable

prisoners getting beaten up or driven to the point of break down. I used to say if you pick on him

you’ll have me to deal with.

Now I live a more meaningful and productive life but the spark within that made me want to be part

of something bigger than myself, that made me want to have beliefs’ and principles can now be

applied to something that doesn’t involve drugs, violence, anger, aggression and crime. I can fully

support the principles of public life as without them, we cannot promote equality, human rights and

diversity and will not succeed in transforming our NHS. We need to ensure the principles of public

life apply to lived experience leaders also. It is in the public interest for EDC to select good lived

experience members who will not act for personal gain but will have the public interest in mind in all

they do. I am committed to working in a way that is open and transparent and if selected, will be

accountable to both the EDC and the values groups and networks, reporting back on the work of

the EDC.