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Next steps in embedding and promoting coproduction
- IPS providers
- IPS specialists
As part of recovery-focused practice, health and treatment services have started to appreciate the added value that “lived experience” can bring to developing, delivering, and improving services. Hence, for example, recovery colleges and peer support roles are now standard practice in mental health services and many drug and alcohol treatment teams. This also involves employing staff with lived experience and enabling them to share their personal stories/experiences, if they wish, with clients and their families to inspire hope and model recovery.
In addition to employing people with lived experience, mental health trusts and third-sector providers have aimed to introduce a range of additional co-production opportunities into their strategic planning and service delivery. These might include strategic working groups, service planning, quality improvement initiatives, and specific service products and initiatives.
IPS Grow undertook desk-based research1 and had discussions with IPS staff and clients in the NHS to understand the level of coproduction occurring in the system and revealed 4 main areas:
| Design | Involved with developing service paperwork, processes, and resources |
| Promotion | Promotion includes co-design of marketing materials and promotional campaigns, sharing stories and engaging with other clients and referrers directly and/or through case studies and videos |
| Delivery | Ongoing work with the service to review progression and performance. Including staff recruitment, training, and retention, or involvement in steering groups. |
| Evaluation | Providing feedback for formal evaluations, annual reviews and fidelity reviews. |
A review of what we at IPS Grow have done revealed further opportunities to integrate coproduction into our approach. To date:
• IPS Grow has created numerous resources and guides for the collaborative platform, although these are not well-known or routinely utilised by teams.
• IPS Grow has created a national peer support network that meets bimonthly to share best practices and resources.
• IPS Grow has helped form a lived experience recruitment group in the North aimed at building further supportive pathways and resources to guide IPS employers in hiring people with lived experience. We would like to expand this nationally.
• IPS Grow has helped create tools to embed race equity and co-production.
Next steps:
Our initial review has highlighted that there is no one way of ‘doing’ co-production, and yet this ethos isn’t fully embedded across teams, including how we plan and develop IPS Grow. Furthermore, people are unaware of the excellent range of support materials available to support coproduction. Given this:
• We want to develop a national forum on co-production and further identify/develop relevant resources and tools to support that approach.
• With the Centre for Mental Health and people with lived experience, we also aim to create a training course for services on how best to embed the value of co-production into their operational delivery.
Ask for now:
Please complete the attached survey so we can better understand the types of co-production that occur across primary care, drug and alcohol, treatment teams, and NHS SMI services.
Please let us know if you are interested in joining a national forum to explore the tailoring of co-production resources for IPS in England. We are seeking people with lived experience.