Holding Hope: Bringing humanity to inform best practice; co-producing mental health and eating disorder education

How can we better prepare health professionals to care for people living and recovering from eating disorders (EDs)? Despite clinical advances in the field of EDs, there remains a clear need to move beyond the “pathologizing diagnoses” to more strengths-based, trauma-informed, recovery-focused models of care. Health professions education (HPE) is taught through a diagnostic and biomedical lens that narrowly focuses on clinical diagnoses and treatments and rarely includes the powerful knowledge lived experience expertise brings to understanding the complexities of EDs.
This presentation introduces a unique concept of how co-production and health humanities-based teaching methodologies can shape our meanings and understandings of EDs, including personalized treatment approaches to develop positive therapeutic alliances that support the national treatment principles and clinical practice best standards. Narrative artefacts, including extracts from the Lived Experience co-author’s-diary, offer valuable insights into their recurrent interactions with healthcare professionals and systems. Rich in symbology and story, this presentation will also draw on how visual thinking strategies (VTS) are used to inspire critical reflection, exploration and interpretation of a narrative portrait titled ‘Holding Hope’.