Although there is no one fixed definition of co-production, it’s essentially about the people who use services and people responsible for services working together in an equal partnership. This can be at all levels: designing a new service, making strategic decisions, and working out how best to operate services day-to-day. We’ve been focusing a lot on how we can ensure co-production is working across the organisation and engaging a board member as a trustee with a learning disability was a significant step towards having people with learning disabilities in a decision making role.
A more recent example of this was last year when two Ambassadors shared a presentation with some of our trustees at a workshop. It was about the consultation with service users around the review of Our Charter review along with their responses to the question “What is important to you?” The Ambassadors then asked the trustees to take part in an exercise to come up with solutions of how we can achieve the responses from the consultation. This is beautifully represented below:
So for us at Grace Eyre, co-production is a central part of our mission to become led by people with learning disabilities.
For further information on co-production, Social Care Institute for Excellence have put together the following easy read document: https://www.scie.org.uk/publications/guides/guide51/files/guide51-easyread.pdf