Sharon Lawn Wins the Tom Trauer Award at TheMHS
- LEA
- 12 hours ago
- 4 min read
We've worked with Sharon Lawn for years, in the way remote colleagues do. Video calls, shared documents, a steady back and forth of emails, rarely ever in the same room. (Which makes a couple of days at TheMHS Conference together an absolute treat!)
Most of what Sharon does happens quietly, on her own, well before it reaches us, but we still thought we had a fair sense of her background.
Then Sharon was announced as a finalist in the Tom Trauer Evaluation and Research Award to be announced at TheMHS Awards Gala Dinner. In the days spent going back through her research for the citation, we found out how much of it we didn't know.
It wasn't that Sharon had hidden anything. It's just not her way to bring her achievements up. Ask her about her work and she'll talk about the people it was for, the impact it made, not the research itself.
Research that drove change based on human experiences
We didn't know that a hospital avoidance service she designed and ran between 2006 and 2008, built entirely around people with lived experience supporting each other out of hospital, saved more than a thousand bed days and close to $400,000 in its first year, and that its model went on to inform the design of a federal support program that ran for many years.
We didn't know her evidence to government on self-management helped bring the person's own perspective into the 2006 National Chronic Disease Strategy on equal footing with clinical measures, work that fed into a $500 million national health initiative.
Nor did we know that her research team's work on low intensity therapy led to her appointment to the federal Health Minister's Expert Advisory Group, informing the design of what's now a Medicare-funded mental health check-in service used across the country.
None of those things was ever dragged into a conversation we'd had with her.
TheMHS - a place that feels like home
Watching Sharon accept the award was a heartwarming and very personal moment. She's been coming to TheMHS since 1999, missing only one year, eight months pregnant at the time, and she described the conference itself as feeling like coming home for Christmas.
This was no stranger stepping up to a podium. It was someone standing in a room she's spent almost three decades learning in, and she used the moment to point, quite literally, at the people around her: colleagues she said she learns from every day, her family for tolerating her passion for research, and LEA for giving her, in her words, the best job in the world.
She spoke of research being about honouring what people give of themselves every time they turn up to take part in it, their emotional selves, their trauma, their practical wisdom, because for them it's not academic, it's their life.
For someone who has spent nearly thirty years building evidence out of exactly that kind of honesty, turning the credit back outward wasn't a performance. It's just what Sharon does.
So, who is Tom Trauer?
There's something fitting in whose name is on the award Sharon received. Professor Tom Trauer spent his career building the tools that let mental health services measure whether what they were doing actually helped anyone, unglamorous work that is, in practice, the difference between a service that changes based on evidence and one that just keeps doing what it's always done. He built infrastructure other researchers could stand on, until illness cut his career short.
Sharon's work operates a little differently: her research doesn't stop at whether something works. It asks how it works, why it works, and the key to it all is ensuring that the person whose life it's meant to improve is asked the right questions. As a careful observer, she recognises topics for research that are often overlooked by typical data analysis and brings them to the forefront. She is someone with lived experience as a consumer and family carer, she knows the kind of struggles people go through. What she has done, consistently, is insist that lived experience sits at the forefront of the research asking those questions, not at its edges.
LEA's national loneliness survey (that Sharon led) helped push a subject the sector had largely ignored into something that is now commonly discussed across services and policy. The Claiming Your Human Rights project, built from the ground up with a true co-design process, captured 186 people's own accounts of what it's actually like to try to assert your rights in a mental health setting.
The power in this report and its resources exists because Sharon instils the importance of lived experience led research into everything she does and everyone she works with. It's no surprise that the resources coming out of it are entirely shaped by people who had those experiences, not something written by 'professionals' for them to approve of afterwards.
Our humble leader
We've worked alongside Sharon for a long time without ever knowing the full extent of what her work has achieved, because she never once brought it up herself. That's not a coincidence. The same instinct that kept her from mentioning any of this to us is the instinct that shaped the research in the first place: put the person in front of her first, whether that's a colleague on a call, someone dropping by our TheMHS booth, or someone filling out a loneliness survey.
Sharon didn't build a career and then decide to stay humble about it. The humility is why the research turned out the way it did. Asking people what their lives are actually like, listening intently when they open up, and responding kindly is all part of who Sharon is.
This is what we see of Sharon in our work together, and we are incredibly proud to see her work recognised in this way, for the work that came before us, the work we have done together, and the work yet to come.
If you'd like to see Sharon's acceptance speech, you can watch it below.
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