The team at Oxehealth explains how coproduction in healthcare can create better outcomes for stakeholders; and how patience, diverse voices, trust-building and valuing all contributions can lead to meaningful impact
Read anything related to healthcare initiatives today and, more often than not, you’ll see a claim about coproduction. “We’ve done this right: this has been coproduced.” It’s a must-do in mental health. But coproduction shouldn’t be done in search of validation or treated as a tick-box exercise. It should be done because, when it’s done well, you get a better outcome for all stakeholders.
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Working alongside our growing group of patient and carer experts, we’ve learned a lot about what effective coproduction looks like. Here’s some of what we know:
Be patient. You will be slower, but the result will be better
Working in health tech is fast-paced – fizzing with energy and ideas, and a focus on getting stuff done. But coproduction introduces a different rhythm. As you welcome more voices, you find yourself thinking things through from different angles. So, a general rule of thumb is to gather all the agenda items for a coproduction session… and then strike through half the list. This helps us to avoid making snap decisions. Even an idea that seems highly impressive at first may be moulded into something even more impactful if time is spent exploring it fully. And sometimes quiet reflections following a meeting lead to “brainwave afterthoughts”.
Proactively seek out diverse voices. It’s often the people whose opinions are overlooked that have the greatest insights and wisdom
Everyone sees things differently, so you need to welcome input from people with varied experiences and perspectives. Good meetings create safe spaces for everyone to speak up. We want to hear all ideas, no matter how off-the-wall they might sound. Sometimes it’s the most out-there ideas that end up having the biggest and best impact. A group of five or six people normally works well – big enough to encourage diverse viewpoints but small enough to maintain productive discussions.
Build trust in every meeting
Honesty and integrity are pivotal in all coproduction efforts. And building trust is essential. It helps to boost people’s confidence and encourages everyone to delve deeper and perhaps more creatively. So we take time to get to know each other as individuals, bonding over our shared commitment to a common goal. This not only means we have a wonderful rapport, but it makes our time together fun, inspiring, and engaging.
Acknowledge and act on contributions, and keep people in the loop
The essence of coproduction in healthcare lies in relinquishing control to service users. People who give their time to working with us have a fundamental desire to make a difference. It’s not essential to act on every point raised, but it is important to ensure that everyone knows their contributions are valued. Give updates on progress, share when initiatives have been given the green light internally, and give credit for great ideas.
As a final note, we’d like to thank our “experts by experience” advisory group for our invaluable, ongoing partnership and their thoughtful contributions to this article. It would be wrong to publish an article on coproduction that wasn’t coproduced!
