By sharing their unique lived experience of using diabetes services, Experts by Experience can provide health care professionals and services with a valuable opportunity to enhance their practice and significantly improve service delivery. Despite an established evidence base in other areas of health care, and emerging evidence that engaging in Expert by Experience activity can beneficially impact people living with diabetes, this important area of practice is still very much neglected in routine diabetes care and the number of people who are able to access this opportunity is small. This paper, written by a team of people who have either acted as, or supported people to become, Experts by Experience, offers practical guidance to diabetes teams to assist them in supporting individuals to engage in this powerful activity while maintaining psychological health and healthy boundaries.

This paper outlines the experience of four universities that collaborated on a pre-arrival shared reading project, the Big Read, in 2018/2019. They did so primarily to promote student engagement and retention and also to ease the transition into higher education, particularly for first-generation students, to promote staff connectedness, and to provide a USP (unique selling point) for their institution. The paper covers all the associated processes, from isolating the respective aims of the collaborators to the choosing and sharing of a single agreed title. In analysing the outcomes, recommendations are made for future cross-institutional projects of this kind.

This paper outlines the experience of four universities that collaborated on a pre-arrival shared reading project, the Big Read, in 2018/2019. They did so primarily to promote student engagement and retention and also to ease the transition into higher education, particularly for first-generation students, to promote staff connectedness, and to provide a USP (unique selling point) for their institution. The paper covers all the associated processes, from isolating the respective aims of the collaborators to the choosing and sharing of a single agreed title. In analysing the outcomes, recommendations are made for future cross-institutional projects of this kind.

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