Ms Deirdre Lillis:

One of the pieces of work with which Dr. Gibjels and I are involved in, as part of an advocacy group, is around our rights and medication. That is an area that people, even independent advocates, are reluctant to touch because it is seen as the territory of the clinicians. The work we are doing is trying to address that issue within a human rights context. We are developing workshops and dialogue sessions relating to informed consent to deliver to people using services and healthcare professionals. There is language of shared consent and shared decision-making in the clinical world that I am familiar with but we want to move to a place where people are empowered to ask questions about their medication, to ask whether a review has happened, to ask about the side effects of a medication and to ask whether there are any other options. Stemming from work conducted in the UK, we also want to encourage service providers to sign up to a pledge to honour a human rights-based approach to the prescribing of medication. We would be happy to talk more about that to the Senator if she is interested.