Involving patients, carers, and community members in strategic and operational decisions in healthcare has always been important – and potentially even more so in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. These are the health sectors key stakeholders, and understand the health system more holistically, and more personally. Collaborating with service users helps the health system to ensure that they are making the right decisions (with more insight about community impacts) in your COVID response. 

In this presentation, Dr Brett Scholz, Dr Andrew Brown and Darlene Cox will discuss the principles of collaboration with service users, and how to collaborate with service users even in the context of COVID-19.  He will also discuss the benefits of and his learnings from running the service user engagement strategy used in the Australian Capital Territory to develop the ICU triage process for COVID-19.