Co-production in healthcare
People with direct experience of a health condition as patients or carers are often the best people to advise on what support and services they need. They're often called people with 'lived experience'.
Co-production is a way of working with people with lived experience to develop services from the earliest stages of service design to delivery and evaluation.
Co-production with children and young people and their parent carers is an important part of the work of Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin’s Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Partnership.
Creating a co-production culture in an organisation means moving away from ‘doing to’ a group of people, and towards ‘doing with’.
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Co-production can be at:
An individual level - children and young people and their parent carers being involved in discussions and decisions about their individual support.
A service (operational) level - people with lived experience and professionals working together to co-produce projects or services together.
A strategic level - people with lived experience and professionals across agencies and sectors working together to co-produce how an organisation or service will work in the future. This might be by creating a plan or a strategy, or new laws.
Examples of co-production in Shropshire and Telford
Lived experience voices
Shropshire Community Health Trust’s Speech and Language Therapy Service has a video ‘All about stammering’ featuring children’s voices. This is an example of putting lived experience voices at the heart of healthcare information campaigns.
Parent Carer Forums (Shropshire PACC and Telford PODS), the SEND Information Advice and Support Service (SENDIASS) and parent engagement groups come together to ensure lived experience voices develop and improve SEND services. For example, they co-produce content for the SEND local offer and the parent carer SEND newsletters.
Service level co-production in health
Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin’s Partnership for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools (PINS) programme is a good example of success in co-production. PINS is a national programme that brings specialist health and education professionals and expert parent carers into mainstream primary schools to improve outcomes for neurodivergent pupils. Shropshire PACC and Telford PODS are key partners in the design, delivery and evaluation of PINS locally.
Strategic co-production in health
Strategic co-production means people and communities working together to develop plans and design services, rather than professionals making decisions alone.
Shropshire PACC and Telford PODS play an important role in representing the parent carer community at a strategic level in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin. They represent and advocate for the needs of families with SEND.