National Co-Production Week 2024

This blog was originally posted on LinkedIn by Aqua Associate Director, Emma Walker. You can find it here: Emma Walker | LinkedIn.

At the beginning of National Co-Production Week, I want to reflect on an amazing call I had with Christopher Morton, Lived Experience Director at Tees Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust. It was a privilege to speak to one of the few UK Directors of lived experience and discuss the benefits of developing meaningful organisational Co-Production through investing in lived experience with supporting structures and cultures.

From that conversation and in response to this year’s Co-Pro theme – What’s Missing? – I want to focus on how the lack of shared power and not being an equal partner is key.

I’m aware there are other key components often missing (lack of clear processes and expectations, diverse and balanced representation), but the ongoing battle for legitimacy and recognition of lived experience and experiential knowledge is often lacking compared to academic, professional legitimacy or credibility.

At Aqua we’re proud lived experience is one of our strategic aims as we work to embed this across systems and organisations, but lack of awareness is still a challenge which our Lived Experience Partners face on a regular basis.

The work of Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice shines an interesting light on this. It describes the often unfair treatment of patients as ‘knowers’ or ‘conveyors of knowledge’ at the point of care. This links to the What Matters To You movement as by focusing on what’s of value to an individual allows professionals to consciously consider any pre-conceptions or biases they may have.

This is also true of how services are designed and improved, often without co-production. Where lived experience is involved, it is often happenstance and potentially hindered due to conscious and unconscious bias.

Speaking with Hilary Bekker, Professor of Medical Decision Making at the University of Leeds, last week as we caught-up on her work developing decision aids and her MINDIT model. Again, this issue aligned as we shared thoughts on how clinicians and patients choose what tacit knowledge they share to co-produce care (as per Hilary’s model).

We talked about how a shared decision making conversation, or being more personalised, should be a 2-way bio-psychosocial process, and not a purely medical model. By doing it this way, clinicians can learn about their patients and their reasoning, which can fundamentally change their view of the patient (biases) and in turn, the treatment options as both parties are ultimately more informed.

My final thoughts? By recognising and valuing experiential knowledge through co-production, at point of care or strategically co-designing services, we can deliver better valued-based care for patients, their families and our wider communities.

What do you think is missing from co-production? Reach out to me if you’d like to find out more about the work we’re doing at Aqua on Co-Production, Lived Experience or Personalised Care – I’d love to hear from you.

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Learn more about our work on co-production, lived experience and personalised care:

• Expert by Experience Training with Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Embedding Personalised Care in Non-Clinical Health Coaching with Sussex MSK Partnership
• The National Child Measurement Programme with St Helen’s Borough Council