Beacon Strategies

06/07/2026

🖍️ Co-Design in Practice

Want to go deeper than surveys and interviews? Try Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD).

EBCD is a structured but flexible approach that brings people with lived experience and staff together to improve a service—starting with real experiences, not assumptions.

What makes it different? It centres stories, relationships, and shared understanding. It’s less about what people think needs fixing, and more about what they’ve felt.

The process usually follows a few key steps:
• Observe the service as it is
• Interview people about their experiences
• Pull together ‘touchpoints’—moments that mattered
• Bring people together in co-design workshops
• Prototype solutions and test them
• Implement and refine

We use EBCD when we want services to be not just better—but more human. If you’re working in health or community services and want to understand how people really experience your service, this approach might be for you.

Experience-based Co-design is an inclusive method used in service design to improve a program, service or product. When you use EBCD, you engage and collaborate with the users of a service to understand their experience and improve it.

03/07/2026

We’re working with Cook Shire Council to develop a Childcare Business Case for Cooktown and surrounding communities.

This work is focused on understanding local childcare demand, service gaps, and barriers to access — and identifying practical options to strengthen early childhood services for families across the region.

As part of this, community input is now open.

If you live, work, or have a connection to the area, you can contribute your perspective via the survey.

Head to the Cook Shire Council website to learn more and have your say.

Beacon Strategies has been engaged to undertake a Childcare Business Case, which will examine current childcare demand, service gaps, barriers to access and opportunities to strengthen childcare options for local families.

30/06/2026

A belated 'welcome' to Emmalene Stevens to the Beacon Strategies team.

Emmalene’s focus at Beacon Strategies is on implementation of the Network of Community Engagement Points program in the Ipswich and Somerset regions, in partnership with our friends at Open Minds Australia.

So great to have you on the team Emmalene!

29/06/2026

If you want to understand your organisation’s safety culture, don’t start with the policy. Start with what happens in practice.

A few simple prompts can tell you more than a dashboard ever will:
- Ask staff how they would raise a safety concern — and what they think would happen next
- Watch a handover and notice what isn’t said
- Review recurring issues in governance meetings — what’s actually changing?
- Walk through your incident reporting process with frontline staff and listen for friction

What you’re looking for isn’t compliance. It’s confidence. Do people feel safe to raise concerns early? Do systems respond, or filter signals out? Safety isn’t the absence of harm — it’s the presence of conditions that make good care more likely.

We’ve pulled together a set of practical reflections and actions in our latest article, along with a self-assessment tool to help organisations take stock and move forward.

This article is part of our Impact Governance series, exploring the core domains that shape how health service organisations maintain systems that deliver safe, effective, person-centred care. To support this work, we’ve developed an Impact Governance Self-Assessment Tool to help organisati

29/06/2026

Happy End of Financial Year!

As we close out another financial year, we want to pause and say a genuine thank you to all of our client partners.

Whether you’re working in government, across Primary Health Networks, or in the not-for-profit sector — it's been a privilege to work alongside you. We know this time of year is busy, often prompting reflection on what’s been delivered and what still needs to be tackled. We’ve appreciated being part of those conversations.

This year, we’ve been fortunate to support a wide range of projects — working with organisations, and the people in them, to plan, design, implement and evaluate programs and services. Across each engagement, our focus has stayed the same: making things practical, grounded, and genuinely useful.

We remain committed to supporting a more impactful social purpose sector —one that is better equipped to respond to the communities it serves. Thank you again for your trust and partnership. We’re looking forward to what the next year brings.

25/06/2026

Great to partner with City of Moreton Bay on their Disability Access and Inclusion Plan — working with community to test and refine actions and priorities, with a strong focus on lived experience and inclusion across diverse groups.

While the consultation period is now closed, you can read more about the process and draft priorities, as well as siging up to receive updates on the Disability Access and Inclusion Action Plan here:

Learn more about the plan (https://ap1.hubs.ly/y0-Z-10)

Shaping Council's new Disability Access and Inclusion Plan.

24/06/2026

Earlier this year we partnered with Country to Coast QLD to develop an organisational stakeholder engagement framework. Great to see one of the products now live on CCQ's website: https://ap1.hubs.ly/y0-ZG40

The stakeholder engagement framework clearly sets expectations, promotes accountability and commits to ‘good’ engagement in practice.

How is your organisation setting the foundations for more meaningful, respectful and proportionate engagement?

How We Work With People, Partners and Communities Country to Coast Queensland (CCQ) works to improve health and wellbeing across Central Queensland, Wide Bay and Sunshine Coast. We do this by building long-term relationships with the people and organisations who deliver care, support wellbeing and s...

24/06/2026

Over the past few years, we’ve had the privilege of working alongside Healthy North Coast as the evaluation partner for the Resilient Kids program.

This has been a genuinely collaborative process — embedding learning alongside delivery and supporting continuous improvement across the program and its partners.

Across the life of the evaluation, we’ve delivered:
- A Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Framework to guide the overall approach
- Year One Evaluation Report capturing early outcomes, insights and lessons
- Year Two Evaluation Report building on these findings and tracking progress over time

A huge thank you to Healthy North Coast and delivery partners — for their openness, collaboration and commitment to learning.

We’re now in the final stages of the evaluation — with the final report to be completed soon.

Looking forward to putting the finishing touches on this work and rounding out what has been a rewarding process.

Download the reports on Healthy North Coast's website:

Resilience Survey — information for schools As part of the Resilient Kids program, Healthy North Coast partnered with schools across the Northern Rivers to deliver Resilient Youth Australia’s Resilience in October and November 2022. Each school has its own secure client portal to access real-tim...

22/06/2026

🖍️ Co-Design in Practice

Doing co-design in healthcare? You’re not starting from scratch.

Across Australia — and beyond — health agencies have invested in practical co-design guides. These toolkits don’t just talk theory. They offer clear, adaptable steps for improving healthcare with patients, not just for them.

Here’s what’s already out there:
• National: AHHA’s EBCD toolkit uses real Australian case studies
• NSW: ACI’s toolkit outlines a four-stage approach with resources to match
• QLD: Clinical Excellence QLD shares frontline innovations (many grounded in co-design)
• VIC: The state-wide HCD Playbook includes practical co-design prompts
• Local: Metro North Health’s guide is detailed and locally grounded
• NZ: Waitematā DHB’s classic guide blends service improvement with strong co-design logic

These resources reflect a shared commitment: services work better when people who use them shape how they’re designed.

At Beacon, we draw on this growing library and apply it to real-world projects. It means we can skip the guesswork — and focus on delivering processes that are both rigorous and human.

Want to dig into the tools we trust?

Explore co-design in healthcare. We cover national and state frameworks, regional guidelines, and our perspective on designing healthcare solutions using co-design.

22/06/2026

Welcome to Hugh Fleming, who has joined Beacon Strategies as a Consultant.

Hugh brings experience in health management consulting, with a focus on implementation and evaluation across a range of policy and service delivery areas.

He has worked across areas including workforce, chronic conditions, disability and mental health, building a solid foundation in analysis and translating findings into practical insights.

Great to have you on the team, Hugh.