June 14, 2024
It's been a busy month for us at Co-Production Collective, filled with new collaborations, insightful workshops, and ongoing support for our project teams. We've engaged in meaningful conversations about trust, anti-racism, and effective co-production practices, which you can read more about in this blog.
London Alliance for the Co-production of Evidence Synthesis (also known as LACES) is a five-year programme we are working on with the EPPI Centre (Evidence for Policy & Practice Information Centre) at UCL (University College London) and UCL Health Economics Policy Lab to deliver high quality summaries of research to inform health and social care decision making across the UK.
We are currently working on the first two projects in the programme, as well as developing an overall Advisory Group for LACES projects. One project aims to map evidence about the implementation of national screening and guidance for diabetic eye conditions. The other explores how we can capture evidence that gives a more holistic approach to measure and guide decision making around child health encompassing healthy eating, physical activity and mental health. You can read more about this programme in our blog.
We have now set up two public involvement and co-production groups involving people with lived and learnt experience as well as other knowledge and skills to support these first two projects. We began working together to agree our ways of working documents, priorities, and co-produce evaluation and ethics processes. The diabetic eye team have been involved in reviewing academic papers to produce an evidence map on how diabetic eye screening programs are implemented in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Our project looking at child health and wellbeing has been co-producing a process and logic model to define which areas should be prioritised in further phases of the project.
The Darzi Fellowship Programme is a leadership development programme which aims to create future clinical leaders.
Krisztina joined the Darzi Fellowship Programme at London Southbank University as a peer mentor to have one-on-one conversations with the Darzi Fellows. The conversations were led by the Fellows, and covered topics such as planning for co-production sessions, evaluating co-production workshops and implementing co-production in the Fellow’s medical practice.
We held a second Co-Pro Cuppa event for participants in the Measuring Success in Co-production programme. At our April Sharing and Learning event, trust in co-production emerged as a key theme. We revisited this at the cuppa, where teams told us how they were going about creating inclusive spaces for diverse voices to be heard within their projects. They shared with us the importance of getting to know each other as they co-produced their work, and the practical methods they had found useful. As Siobhan, a co-producer from the Co-production from the Inside-Out project put it: “big ideas come out of small conversations”. We look forward to meeting all the teams again at our next event on June 20th.
As part of our efforts to explore how we can be an anti-racist community, we have been working on a project with People’s Voice Media that was launched in October 2023 to understand the experiences within co-production of individuals from racialised backgrounds and global majority communities.
As part of this project, conversations have taken place with 26 people from communities with lived experience of racism and 9 themes have emerged. These themes were explored in more depth at a workshop earlier this month with people from minoritised communities that have been involved in co-production. This workshop highlighted the complexity of the effects of racism and the need for openness and acceptance to prevent long-term emotional damage. Another workshop will follow next month.
Participants shared their beliefs that co-production spaces often maintain hierarchies and retain power imbalances. This can be especially challenging for people facing multiple (intersectional) challenges. People also noted the importance of recognising that there are allies in co-production, who are working to ensure that opportunities are equitably distributed amongst everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or background. You will find more reflections about this project in this blog.
Later this month, we will be hosting our fourth Deepening Practice session as part of the Measuring Success in Co-production programme. This is the final time that our partners at the Evaluation Exchange (a partnership between UCL and the voluntary and community sector) will be supporting the eight funded project teams in this way. This session will focus on ways to overcome the challenges that are commonly experienced when processing and sharing information gathered through evaluation. One of our team’s co-producers will present insights she has gained from analysing and sharing evaluation findings.
As you may know we are currently working on redeveloping our website so that we can better communicate what we do. Thank you to all those of you have been involved so far. We are still looking for video clips from members of our community on a variety of topics to go on the website:
These video clips are for our new website. If you are happy to help us out with this, please get in touch by emailing us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk.
Thanks to those who joined us at the June Cuppa last week, we had a great and wide-ranging discussion that covered topic such as accessibility in online and in-person spaces, and how we can amplify people’s voices without putting them in the limelight.
Our next Co-Pro Cuppas will take place on:
You can sign up to our upcoming Co-Pro Cuppas on our website or on our Eventbrite page. If you have any questions or would like to know more about our work, please get in contact by emailing us on coproduction@ucl.ac.uk.
Photo credit: Cody Engel from Unsplash
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