Health professions education cultures and practices are changing, with increasing calls to actively partner with healthcare consumers across the education continuum, including informing health professions education content, curriculum design and pedagogical approaches. This movement towards valuing and foregrounding lived experience expertise in health professions and clinical education has clear benefits for learners, including developing more humanistic, person-centred health professionals and practice. For healthcare consumers, it offers an opportunity to shift traditional power relations in health professions education through meaningful partnership and increased agency to improve education and the outcomes of healthcare. This paper outlines how to establish and sustain collaborative and successful partnerships with healthcare consumers to co-design health professions education. Here, we provide applied examples and lessons learned from four co-designed projects across four healthcare disciplines and learning contexts to advance clinical educators' skills, capacity and confidence to partner with healthcare consumers in health professions education.