David O'Brien feels passionate about social justice, human rights, empowering communities, and transforming healthcare. He has lived experience with addiction, poverty, and the criminal justice system. He is now in recovery and mentors others. He wants to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion on the Equality and Diversity Council by drawing on his lived experience and community engagement work. He has been involved with the Greater Manchester Values Group since 2011, contributing to initiatives on recovery, lived experience, sustainability in healthcare, and mindfulness.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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.

6. 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..

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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.