English Co-production Network Meeting
Representatives from across the health and social care sectors and from local governnment plus university researchers and community and patient representatives came together to explore the potential to establish an English Network for Co-Production of research, policy and practice.
Philip Kerrigan attended the event which was held in Manchester on 28 March (2019) and led by Co:Create at University College London.
The event featured a number of presentations, including on maximising impact from co-producing research, blending co-production and policy-making, and effectively evaluating co-production. There were also plenty of opportunities for everyone to share best practice. It was agreed that at a time of relative economic austerity and cuts to budgets, it was particularly important that every effort was made to engage communities in identifying what were the most pressing challenges for them and in generating solutions that would improve their health and wellbeing and the quality of the environment in which they lived and the services they received.
One of the key purposes of the day was to explore the feasibility of initiating a co-production special interest network for England, as exists already in Scotland and Wales, and there was broad enthusiasm for taking this forward. It was agreed that the network should meet periodically and generate a national set of guidelines for evidence-informed best practice in this area. The network would also look at creating a bank of case studies from across a variety of sectors and at the possibility of introducing a mentoring scheme.