Implementing co-production

Implementing co-production involves creating a collaborative environment where service users and providers work together as equal partners throughout the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of services.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing co-production:

1. Establish a Co-Production Mindset

• Educate and Train: Everyone involved needs a shared understanding of what co-production is and why it matters. This means providing time and space to learn through training, discussion, reflection and stories from experience.

• Foster a cultural shift: Co-production only works when mutual respect, openness and collaboration are actively practised - especially by those in positions of leadership. Change begins with modelling these values.

2. Engage Stakeholders

• Identify who needs to be involved: This includes people with lived experience, those giving care and support, friends and family members, health and care professionals, and others in the community.

• Build relationships: Before decisions or plans are made, there needs to be trust. Informal conversations, community gatherings or workshops can create the space for people to get to know one another, share expectations and begin to work together.

3. Set Up Structures and Processes

• Create co-production teams: These groups should reflect a mix of voices and perspectives including people who use services, those delivering them and others in support roles.

• Define roles and responsibilities: Everyone needs to know what they’re there to do and how decisions will be made.

• Develop shared ground rules: Set expectations for how people will interact, communicate and listen to one another, with care and curiosity at the centre.

4. Joint Planning and Design

• Assess needs together: Collaborative needs assessments help surface priorities and focus areas that may not have been visible from one perspective alone.

• Set shared goals: Clear, achievable goals co-created by everyone involved help anchor the work and guide decisions.

• Design solutions collaboratively: Whether through workshops, co-design sessions or creative planning methods, ideas should emerge through shared insight - not pre-set agendas.

5. Shared Decision-Making

• Choose how decisions will be made: Consent or consensus-based decision-making ensures no one is left out of the process. This takes more time, but leads to stronger outcomes.

• Stay transparent: Keep decisions open, documented and accessible. When people can see how choices were made, trust builds and accountability is clearer.

6. Collaborative Implementation

• Develop action plans together: Everyone should have a hand in shaping what happens next; agreeing who is doing what, by when, and how progress will be tracked.

• Allocate resources fairly: Ensure time, money and support are distributed in ways that allow for real participation from everyone involved.

7. Ongoing Feedback and Evaluation

• Make space for feedback: Create regular, safe opportunities for people to share how things are going. Then act on that feedback in meaningful ways.

• Measure together: Use agreed measures to check what’s working and what isn’t. Involve everyone in making sense of the findings.

• Adapt and improve: Co-production is never finished. Services, relationships and needs change. Flexibility and reflection are built-in features, not add-ons.

8. Sustainability and Scaling

• Keep people involved: Show how their contribution makes a difference. Celebrate progress. Stay in touch.

• Grow skills and confidence: Offer continuing support and opportunities for development, so that people can deepen and strengthen their role in co-producing.

• Scale with care: When something works well, it can be adapted and extended so long as the core values stay intact and the process is shaped by each new context.