Jumping into June: monthly team update

May flew by in a whirlwind of co-creation sessions, co-production book announcements and inspiring conversations. We’re looking forward to using June to start to bring together the feedback from our payment policy co-creation sessions and get a new draft ready for further co-creation. We’ll be sharing information about how you can get involved in this as soon as we can, so watch this space.

June is also book review month! Thanks so much to everyone who put themselves forward to be one of our co-produced book reviewers – we had over 40 responses, which was well beyond our expectations. This meant we had to pick the 30 reviewers (one for each chapter)out of a hat and not everyone who registered was able to be a reviewer this time.  However, both volumes of COVID-19 and Co-production in Health and Social Care Research, Policy and Practice are free to access via this link and everyone is welcome to join the book’s official launch event on 22 June – you can book your free ticket here. We’re really looking forward to reading the submissions and working with the Dissecting Health Research Group to bring these individual contributions together into what we think will be the first co-produced academic book review! We’re hoping to share the review at the event too, so do join if you can.

Supporting co-production in practice

Lizzie and Niccola are looking forward to supporting a number of different co-production projects this month. We’re co-ordinating an advisory group and facilitating workshops as co-production partner on an NIHR funded project focusing on child health, delivered by UCL’s EPPI-Centre (Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre). This aims to bring together researchers, public health professionals, teachers, parents and carers to co-create new approaches to help local services use research evidence effectively. We’re also delivering co-production training(alongside co-producer Pat and others) for WISERD (Wales institute for Social and Economic Research and Data).

If you’re reading this before Wednesday 2 June then there’s just about still time to sign up for the Institute of Community Reporters annual conference. The theme this year is ‘The Future of Lived Experience’ and we’re thrilled to be delivering a session on ‘Values-based co-production: from chit-chat to everyday reality’ alongside co-producers Isaac, David, Mark and Donna: register to join us here. If you’re reading this later in the month, then we’re sorry to miss you! But don’t worry, Mark and Donna will be writing a blog reflecting on the session in the coming days.

Collective Development

Rory is taking time this month to look back at the previous issues of our newsletter, find out what you thought was most relevant or important. Popular blogs always include examples and experiences of co-production, as well as opportunities to get involved indifferent projects, so if you have any of these to share, why not get in touch? Our website and newsletter are a platform for the whole Co-Production Collective community, so please do email coproduction@ucl.ac.uk with your ideas.

This process of looking back is also helping us to stop and appreciate how fast our Collective has grown since the official launch in October 2020 – we’ve nearly doubled our number of Twitter followers in that time!  We’ve been especially thrilled by the popularity of our Co-Pro Cuppas; we’ve had to use a waiting list but just about managed to squeeze everyone in so far! June is now definitely fully booked but there is plenty of space in July and August and you can register via our events page. Please do email us if you book on to a session and then can’t attend – we totally understand this happens but letting us know means that we can make sure others are able to join in your place.

It’s clear that the space to come together with others interested in co-production, share challenges and get support is so valuable, particularly in the virtual world we’re currently living in. We’re taking small steps towards the possibility of a membership platform or community space, so we can develop even more possibilities for connection and collaboration. But in the meantime Rory is going to be updating our existing database to make sure we can keep in touch with everyone in our community effectively.

Get involved!

Please get in touch to tell us what you’d like to see in our newsletter, any ideas you’d like to share, or questions we might be able to help with! Email us at coproduction@ucl.ac.uk or message us on Twitter, and one of the team will get back to you as soon as we can.    

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