Dr Mel Hughes is a Principal Academic in Social Work at Bournemouth University and a registered social worker. She completed a degree in Human Communication and Communication Disorders at the University of Manchester in 1995 and a Diploma and Masters in Social Work at the University Edinburgh in 1997.
As a social work practitioner she worked in mental health and substance use services in local authority, voluntary sector and primary care settings across Greater Manchester. She moved into academia in 2005 when appointed Lecturer in Social work at Bournemouth University (BU).
Having been Programme Leader for the BA and MA Social Work degree programmes at BU, Mel teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate social work programmes and supervises PhD students. She champions lived experience education (involvement of service users and carers) at BU, nationally and internationally through her roles as Academic Lead for the PIER (Public Involvement in Education and Research) partnership and Deputy Lead for the Research Centre for Seldom Heard Voices.
She has a national profile for designing, delivering and promoting innovative, evidenced-based, impactful approaches to involving people with lived experience in social work and health education, research and practice. The PIER partnership has over 100 service user and carer members, collaborates with 26 third-sector organisations and coordinates over 1,000 direct contact hours a year between students, academics and service users. Activities include service users and carers facilitating groups, delivering workshops, presenting lectures, assessing presentations, making films and designing curricula.
Mel has also spent 15 years creating and sharing high quality pedagogic resources such as films, digital stories and lived experience narratives. She has developed a range of pedagogic tools to embed transformative learning and lived experience education in professional programmes and shares these through journal articles, books, chapters, films, digital stories, blogs, presentations and workshops. She is editor and co-author of the text book: ‘A Guide to Statutory Social Work Interventions: the lived experience’. Chapters are co-authored with people with first-hand experience of statutory interventions including having a child removed, being detained under the Mental Health Act and going through the adoption process.