National Co-production Week 2023
We're excited about National #CoProWeek hosted by SCIE (social care institute for excellence) from 3 - 7 July 2023.
For the eighth year running, Co-production Week will celebrate the benefits of co-production, share good practice and highlight the contribution of people who use services and their carers in developing better public services.
The theme this year Co-production in the real world.
Co-production is about working in equal partnership with people using services, carers, families and citizens. Co-production offers the chance to transform social care and health provision to a model that offers people real choice and control.
We take co-production seriously at GMMH and our Recovery Academy currently offers 65 courses co-designed and co-delivered by 43 tutors, 25 of which are people with lived experience of our services.
You can find out more about how the Academy is run in the article below. We’ve also got some great examples in the articles below of co-production in action throughout our services.
You can learn more about Co-production Week at https://www.scie.org.uk/co-production/week
- Our Recovery Academy 10 years on
- My Health Passport - Using Co-Production to inform Service Delivery
- Carers Lived Experience – Co-Production to inform Services
- Living Well and Co-Production
- Research and Co-Production
- Participation Leadership in Psychological Training at GMMH Psychological Therapies Training Centre
Our Recovery Academy 10 years on – Celebrating the benefits of co-production, sharing good practice and the contribution of people with lived experience
The Recovery Academy first launched in 2013 and has just celebrated its 10th birthday! Since first opening the doors, the Academy has offered a wide range of learning opportunities for anyone looking to manage their own mental wellbeing or support someone else.
At the heart of the Recovery Academy lies its core values of inclusivity, empowerment, and hope. These values are embedded within the Recovery Academy via the co-production approach, meaning that all resources are co-developed and co-delivered with people with lived experience.
The co-production approach ensures resources are accessible, reliable, and informed from different perspectives, creating an effective learning environment for all. Lived experience tutors also provide a real sense of hope for students and can themselves benefit from increased confidence and self-esteem. The co-production approach also challenges traditional perceptions of support and recognises with equal weight, the value of everyone’s experiences.
Our resources include over 60 face-to-face courses, focusing on areas such as improving understanding around mental health, learning new skills and supporting wellbeing through creativity. The Academy also offers over 250 digital resources, including e-learning packages, self-help worksheets and our very own radio station featuring podcasts and relaxation audio tracks.
The Recovery Academy is free to join and available to:
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Anyone who is experiencing mental health and/or addiction problems (you do not have to be under the care of NHS mental health services).
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Their supporters (family, friends and loved ones).
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GMMH staff members, volunteers, and students on placement.
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Any healthcare professionals.
Face-to-face courses are held in Manchester, Trafford, Bolton, Salford and Wigan.
Around the co-production ethos of the Recovery Academy, students who have recently accessed courses with us said:
"It's so empowering to learn from people's unique and personal lived experiences. You won't find this level of valuable knowledge in any textbook, that's for sure. In a learning environment, it makes all the difference in a hope-inspiring way!!"
“I think having people with lived experience alongside professionals delivering some of these classes is amazing. Having shared knowledge of both sides of experience and bringing it together to help others is truly something that I believe can help people move forward in their recovery journey.
“It has helped me immensely to feel accepted and that mine and other people's experiences can be valued and taught alongside with the expert knowledge of the facilitators. Co-facilitating is a fantastic way to help people get involved whilst still on their own personal recovery journey.”
If you would like to see what the Recovery Academy can offer you and create you very own Recovery Academy account, visit our website at: https://recoveryacademy.gmmh.nhs.uk/
GMMH staff members and volunteers can access all resources via their Learning Hub.
You can also contact the Recovery Academy team directly with any questions at: recoveryacademy@gmmh.nhs.uk or telephone: 0161 358 1771.
My Health Passport - Using Co-Production to inform Service Delivery
A ‘Patient Passport’ (also known as a Health Passport) is a document with the service user at its heart. It is owned by the patient and includes personalised information about them and their health needs.
A thorough patient passport acts as a handy reference guide to the person and can also include other information the service user would want professionals working with them to know. This could include their interests, likes, dislikes, how they communicate and any reasonable adjustments that might be required.
It’s intended to help health professionals during clinical discussions with patients that go beyond what is included in a person’s medical record.
During 2022, GMMH set about developing a Health Passport to support our service users as they access and transition between different health and social care providers. This piece of work was in direct response to service users telling us that they find repeating their current and past experiences extremely repetitive, frustrating, and sometimes traumatising.
Whilst there are now many different versions of Health Passports available on the internet, we wanted to develop one with, and for, people who use mental health services.
Avril Clarke was involved in the process and had this to say about why co-production was an integral element to the project:
“Working on the patient passport project was truly a piece of co-production. Prompted by a service user, the project began as a consultation between service users, carers and staff.
“After many zoom meetings and idea gathering from what worked across other services and other trusts we finally met face to face and had sessions cutting and pasting quite literally to get what service users wanted in this trust looking at how this would work for staff as well as right down to what was achievable using the technology available to us.
"A great project to be involved in and looking forward to seeing it in action.”
The GMMH Health Passport is currently being trialled across various services before we look to roll it out across the Trust for wider use. For further information, please email serviceusersandcarers@gmmh.nhs.uk
Carers Lived Experience – Co-Production to inform Services
The carers, family and friends of those we support have told us that understanding and compassion from our staff makes such a difference to their journey. Because so many carers don’t realise that their role has a name, it is vital that our staff are skilled at identifying those involved in a caring role and can have discussions to enable these people to identify themselves as carers.
We need to offer/signpost carers to support in their own right and involve carers in the care and treatment of the service user where possible.
The last 12 months has seen the launch of our Carers Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), outlining expectations of staff to identify, support, involve and record carers information correctly.
The experiences of a number of our carers across the Trust were used to inform the Carers SOP which includes our services responsibilities to carers under The Care Act, details of the resources we have available to support staff move this work forward as well as detailed information on how to record all carer related activity on our electronic recording system (PARIS).
It supports staff to have the tools available to be able to identify carers at various stages throughout treatment, gives guidance to staff on consent and sharing information with carers, expectations around carers assessments and tools to support carers being involved in care.
To coincide with the Carers SOP, two carers training programmes have been developed with input from carers across the Trust.
Co-Production of the SOP and training programme with our carers has played a vital role in service improvements with feedback from staff referencing the carers voice has made the training come to life.
To discuss the Carers Training programmes in further detail, email serviceusersandcarers@gmmh.nhs.uk
Living Well and Co-Production
Living Well are community services where less intensive support is required than a traditional community mental health team.
They are multidisciplinary teams (MDT) comprised of recovery workers, peer support, occupational therapists and nurses and can support people with practical support, solution focussed care, relational support, strategies for low mood and activity support (to name a few).
We spoke to colleagues at our Salford Living Well team about how co-production has been utilised to develop the service:
“Salford Living Well is a multi-organisational project – made up of NHS and voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) partners - delivering an innovative mental health service sitting between primary and secondary care. It came about to help those that are consistently at risk of falling through the gaps in service criteria.
“We deliver short-term, goal-orientated interventions before supporting with an onward journey. As Living Well is a person-centred service, both the direction of that onward journey and their goals are co-produced with the individual as a direct partner in their care planning.
“Further to that, Living Well is committed to the voice of lived experience. We have a lived experience team within the MDT, with the weight of that team being Peer Support Workers.
“These staff are people who have themselves experienced debilitating mental health issues previously and are now at a point where they are able to utilise that experience to support others dealing with the similar situations.
“Whether it is the first or hundredth time a person has had to use a mental health service, it can continue to be a daunting issue. With a peer alongside them - a person who has been where they are emotionally and can deeply empathise - it can offer a real lifeline, warmth, and humanity to the process.
“Lived experience staff work in a relational way, building rapport and trust with service users who have gone on to report being more comfortable with the process and in most cases more hopeful that they’ve a future beyond where they are now.
“Having lived experience practice at the core of their job role allows us to remove the inescapable power imbalance we see between medical professionals and service users.
“Beyond that, they can critically challenge the working practice of clinical and, ultimately, all staff within the MDT with unique insights that may otherwise be lost through other routes of feedback gathering.
“The latter is an example of ingraining coproduction in the workplace. Peers sit in the same MDT case discussions and other meetings and offer their opinions on care plans and suggestions on how they could be changed to make them more accessible.
“One example would be picking up on best methods for correspondence with a neurodivergent service user who may have otherwise been discharged for not engaging with the service. We learn a great deal from the breadth of experience in the team and have been able to alter best practice to offer broad reasonable adjustments to support service user engagement as a direct consequence.
“Separately, coproduction in our team allows insights into the reality of taking a care plan in a certain direction e.g. certain diagnoses come with limiting and or financially costly implications such as much higher insurance brackets, and the inability to travel to certain countries.
“Ultimately, coproduction is a means to quality improvement by team diversification. You’re bringing the strengths of individuals from wider backgrounds and representations. When you then add lived experience into that diversification, you are offering context, knowledge, insight, and empathy to quality improvement processes via a route that cannot be replicated with academic study.
“By having those different skillsets in the team, it results in a much more comprehensive mental health service that is accessible and deeply human.”
To find out more about co-production of our Living Well Services in Manchester, we spoke to Aron Moss, Operational Programme Manager:
“There is a wealth of knowledge and experience within communities, amongst people who experience mental illness and their families, that is often overlooked.
“To make the development of Living Well a success, it involves people with lived experience, the statutory and the voluntary sectors as equal partners in the design of the service. Co-design and co-production are core mechanisms in developing, delivering, and appraising the Living Well model.
“Co-production occurs in various ways within Living Well. These include the Collaborative meetings, in which various people from Manchester come together to contribute their knowledge and experiences to build the three local Living Well services.
“To support the involvement of people with lived experience, we have been working with Gaddum to develop co-production spaces for those with first-hand experience of mental illness. We have also established a Carers Living Well forum so that family members and loved ones can contribute to defining the service.
“These forums are not merely consultation; we’re not solely seeking the views of others and ‘listening’. We want to go further than this, by striving to engage people to be active in the development journey of the model.
“The people involved in these opportunities play an equal role in the decision making, they feel ownership of the work we are all involved in, and they are committed to supporting the service.
“By taking this approach, we hope that Living Well in Manchester will be a holistic service, that has a shared sense of ownership, reflects the diversity of the people who will gain support from the service, and in turn will provide a richer, positive experience of care for people experiencing mental illness and their families.”
Research and Co-Production
Our Psychosis Research Unit (PRU) have been long standing advocators of Co-Production in their work. We spoke to Mellissa Pyle, Research Trial Manager, for further information on what this looks like in practice:
“Co-production is essential to research and at the Psychosis Research Unit co-production can take place in several ways. From the inception of a research question to the delivery of a research trial we seek oversight from a service user reference group (SURG) who have lived experience of psychosis.
“The SURG consider the importance of the research questions to ensure that the research we do is meaningful for those we wish to help or support. Working alongside the SURG is essential in shaping how the research is delivered. They consider the appropriateness of our treatment manuals, protocols and questionnaires and advise us on how we may best engage people who would be eligible for our trials.
“Some recent examples including reviewing the content of an App to be evaluated in a clinical trial and supporting us with potential adaptations of a peer support intervention workbook and manual.
“SURG have advised on protocols and training required for research staff conducting interviews and questionnaires, for example ensuring the explanation of a questionnaire and the purpose of doing it, is both understandable and sensitive. SURG advised on the importance of offering wellbeing checks following research assessments.
“Some of the research teams members have their own lived experience and incorporate their lived experience perspective in their research role. These roles are varied and include chief investigator or co-investigator for funded clinical trials/ research projects, authors of research publications, members of research oversight committees, and as researchers working on specific projects such as interview-based studies that seek to understand the service user experience of a research trial.
“At PRU the Let’s Talk trial is in the final stages of the study. Let’s Talk is a three-year project that has included the adaptation of a peer intervention and a two-year feasibility trial of the peer intervention.
“Co-production has been at the heart of Let’s Talk with both the SURG and lived experience team members shaping the adaptation of the peer-led intervention and the management of the study. Adaptation work was via data from interviews with people who have experience of psychosis and/or being a peer support worker.
“The interview topic guides were designed by lived experienced researchers following consultation with the SURG, interviews were conducted and analysed by lived experience researchers to produce key recommendations to adapt an existing workbook and manual for the delivery of the intervention. Further, the workbook and manual underwent several iterations before producing a trial ready version, with each iteration being reviewed by lived experienced team members.
“This level of co-production ensures that any adaptations made are meaningful and truly tailored to the needs of the people we wished to work with us on the project. We are also proud to work closely with the McPin Foundation who state; ‘We believe research is done best when it involves people with relevant personal experience that relates to the research being carried out.’ The McPin collaboration has included staff training, reflective space for peer staff led by lived experience, and oversight of research data analysis.”
