Evidence papers and journal articles

This paper builds on a previous article on an innovative approach to improve services by collaborating with service users and practitioners. It focuses on investigating the impact of this approach by including the perspectives of service users as collaborators and co-authors.

The terms co-creation, co-design, and co-production are often used interchangeably when describing initiatives involving multiple stakeholders. Although they share similarities, there are important differences, especially in the context of public health, regarding the roles and level of engagement of stakeholders and when they are involved. this article summarizes these similarities and differences by drawing from various fields such as public administration, governance, service management, design, marketing, and public health.

SPACES (Supporting Physical Activity through Co-production in people with Severe Mental Illness) is a study which aims to develop an intervention to increase physical activity created with and for people with severe mental ill health. The SPACES team employed a comprehensive process of Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) work embedded within a co-production strategy. The article describes the co-production model it uses, the benefits, challenges, achievements and areas for learning and improvement.

This study examines the collaboration between practitioners and service users in two programs over time, identifying the factors that contribute to or hinder the long-term sustainability of co-production. There is no single approach that guarantees sustainable co-production; it depends on the specific service and its operating environment. Sustainable co-production relies on four key elements: structure, skills, resources, and mutual commitment. The structure should effectively utilize available resources and skills to foster the ongoing commitment of both service users and professionals to continue collaborating.

The document explores the origins of co-production and co-design, their application in healthcare, and the challenges they bring. It also highlights the implications for healthcare practice and future research.

This article talks about the differences between how people experience time in their everyday lives and the ways that researchers and theorists think about involving people in research. It focuses on studying children who migrate alone and how their experiences with immigration and welfare systems often involve conflicting and sometimes unfair ways of dealing with time.

Despite increasing support within universities and amongst research funders for participatory research approaches, institutional processes and funding requirements continue to limit participatory engagements that meaningfully further social justice. Recognising this disconnect, UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity, Co-Production Collective, and Institute of Education, supported by UCL’s Grand Challenge of Justice & Equality, set out to investigate the practical barriers university researchers and community partners face in conducting participatory social justice research.

Children and young people’s involvement is an increasing priority in UK healthcare and in heath research, alongside recognition that involving children and young people in research requires different considerations to involving adults. Underpinned by children’s rights and a co-production ethos this paper, co-authored with young evaluators, explores the learning from a co-produced evaluation of eyeYPAG, a young persons’ research advisory group (YPAG) for eye and vision research based at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, UK.

The Liverpool Co-PARS project was a four-year iterative process in which a physical activity referral scheme for inactive patients with health conditions was developed, refined, and evaluated. The aim of the present study was to explore multidisciplinary stakeholder perspectives of those involved in the co-production of Co-PARS and inform recommendations for future co-production research.

Paper arguing that co-producing critique from within the university requires designing boundary spaces, intermediating between knowledge claims and balancing between articulated and attributed values for co-production. This gives rise to co-production as an epistemic praxis, not method, characterised by boundary work, epistemic choreography and triple shifting.

A rapid participatory appraisal was conducted with midwives and stakeholders from European Midwifery Units to explore the clarity and usability of the Midwifery Unit Self-Assessment (MUSA) Tool, to understand how it helps MUs identifying areas for further improvement, and to identify the degree of support maternity services need in this process.

This scoping review aims to map co-production approaches used in care homes for older adults in previous research to support the inclusion of residents and care staff as equal collaborators in future studies.

This special issue editorial explores: How is creativity applied within co-production? How does such creativity influence the incorporation of evidence into policy or practice? What impact(s) or effect(s) does creativity have in these applications? What are the implications of this, and for whom?

This study aimed to understand how to reduce decline in physical function and physical activity in people with long-term conditions, using realist methods integrated with co-design to provide an explanatory account of what works (or does not), for whom and in what circumstances, to generate ideas about service innovation, and provide recommendations for primary care.

A scoping review systematically mapping recent literature on co-production in applied health research in the United Kingdom to inform co-production practice and guide future methodological research. It argues for accepting the diversity in approaches to co-production, calls on researchers to be clearer in their reporting of these approaches, and makes suggestions for what researchers should record.

This paper explores the meaning of co-production for clinicians based on their experience of co-production in a Recovery College, using thematic analysis of eight semi-structured interviews with clinicians who have co-produced and co-delivered workshops with a Recovery College Peer Trainer.

This paper draws on conversations between a group of research associates who worked on a large-scale co-produced research project, Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement. Through our conversations and subsequent analysis, three themes emerged regarding our experiences working on the project: (1) Working across difference; (2) Engaging with arts practice; and (3) Creating the conditions for co-production.

This paper introduces Mental Health Experience Co-design (MH ECO), a peer designed and led adapted form of Experience-based Co-design (EBCD) developed in Australia. It identified eight possible mechanisms from an assessment of the activities and outcomes of MH ECO and a review of existing published evaluations.

Editorial about the different ways of knowing, prefacing articles exploring ways of sharing knowledge across language, cultural or disciplinary differences.

Through key informant interviews with parents, non-profit organizations and government officials, this article argues that accountability is not co-produced because citizen co-producers are overly burdened with a disproportionate share of risk and responsibility compared to government co-producers with minimal support.

Paper discusses co-production in quantitative research (with a specific focus on randomized controlled trials), how it can work in practice, and the barriers and enablers of co-production. It focuses on a randomized controlled trial of a peer support intervention in mental health which explicitly set out to coproduce knowledge and employed service user researchers.

Study of a set of experiments that offered subjects a financial incentive to assist municipalities in helping refugees integrate. The experiment was first conducted among university students within a laboratory setting. Then, the initial findings were replicated and extended among a general adult sample. Results suggest that small financial rewards have no effect.

This special issue arises from an international pursuit funded by the US National Science Foundation through SESYNC (the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center) to further explore the contribution of co-creation to support the use of evidence in policy and practice change.

This study describes the critical success factors behind SEARCH, focusing on how Study of Environment on Aboriginal Resilience and Child Health (SEARCH) was established, and continues to build trusting co-creative relationships. It also explores some continuing challenges and considers how the partnership might be strengthened.

The article focuses on the co-production of public services, offering theory-based and knowledge-based routes to evidencing co-production. It cites a range of ‘good enough’ methodologies which community organisations and small-scale service providers experimenting with co-production can use to assess the potential contribution, including appreciative inquiry, peer-to-peer learning and data sharing.

This article is a response to ‘The dark side of coproduction: do the costs outweigh the benefits for health research?’ recently published in Health Research Policy and Systems (2019, 17:33). The original commentary raises some important questions about how and when to co-produce health research, including highlighting various professional costs to those involved. However, we identify four related limitations in their inquiry.

The results of this research describe a sample of patient and family members currently engaged with health systems. We identified seven motivational factors underlying their engagement.

This paper reports the development and presents the targets (subject areas) and components of a prototype website to support family caregivers of a person with dementia towards the end of life.

There has also been a subtle shift in the discourse, with the language of co-design and co-production used more widely in debates about involvement. This shift has surfaced once again debates about what counts as meaningful involvement. In this paper we seek to contribute to this debate by exploring boundaries and overlaps between them.

Using first person reflective narrative, this paper explores how community participatory approaches enable barriers to co-production to be overcome in a primary mental health service.

In this paper the development of the Exchange Network is presented, an experimental learning space deliberately designed to foreground, and work on this relational dynamic in healthcare research and quality improvement.

This article draws upon an empirical study of ‘child-led research’ projects, undertaken in Bangladesh, Jordan and Lebanon, for a critical examination of the meanings and implications of ‘child-led research’. In particular, this paper explores what counts as knowledge in social science research within contexts of generational difference and power.

Two cases are presented — one from Brazil and one from Nigeria. The third section of the paper provides a brief overview of the theory of coproduction and its relevance for understanding the two cases. The last section addresses the implications of coproduction in polycentric systems for synergy and development.

This article looks at the purported advantages of co-production, and considers how these can best be accessed. A case study workshop involving social housing users and providers, conducted as part of the National Consumer Council-Unison Shared Solutions project, is used to illustrate the need for collective dialogue and deliberation between co-producers rather than purely transactional forms of co-production.

This article argues that rather than trying to determine one encompassing definition of the concept, several different types of coproduction can be distinguished. Recognizing different types of coproduction more systematically is a critical step in making research on this phenomenon more comparable and more cumulative.

This paper surveys the history of an alternative view of value creation to that associated with industrial production. It argues that technical breakthroughs and social innovations in actual value creation render the alternative—a value co-production framework—ever more pertinent.

This paper reports on setting up a training programme for lay assessors. It describes a way of working that embodies a regional, cross-organisational approach to co-producing training with members of the public.

This article outlines how co-production might be understood as a utopian method, which both attends to and works against dominant inequalities. It suggests that it might be positioned ‘within, against, and beyond’ current configurations of power in academia and society more broadly. It develops this argument by drawing on recent research funded through the UK’s Connected Communities programme.

The aim of this study was to identify a key set of principles and recommendations for co-creating public health interventions. These recommendations aim to help the co-creation of public health interventions by providing a framework and governance to guide the process.

An essential first step to advancing public participation in health is to put it in the context of developing modern democracy more generally. This article seeks to do this by identifying four key stages in the development of public participation in health and social care.

Using ethnographic data with four applied health research projects, we explored how everyday rituals generate and sustain inclusivity. Informed by interactional ritual change theory, we identify two types of interlinked inclusivity: relational, individuals routinely engaging together; and emotional, the feeling of being included.

Selection of academic papers from the the co-production knowledge base of the Welsh Network for Co-production.

This briefing is based on a systematic review of joint decision-making. Joint decision-making initiatives can increase wellbeing in a number of ways, when looking at interventions such as community involvement in urban renewal projects, co-production in public services and participatory budgeting.

Stakeholders across the public sector, industry, academia and civil society expect demonstrable impacts and to be engaged in the co-creation and coproduction of socially robust knowledge. This Working Paper explores the question: ‘What is research impact in the humanities and social sciences (SSH) and how might we measure, accelerate and stimulate it?’

This report is part of Work Package 2 in the ACCOMPLISSH project. It includes the results and conclusions from 14 focus group interviews with quadruple helix partners in 12 countries. Having considered, planned and worked with quadruple helix collaboration and co-creation in the fields of Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH), the authors of the report can come with the following recommendations.

This working paper draws on the experiences and knowledge of the participants of the ACCOMPLISSH dialogue platform and represents a consolidation of our shared learning so far, just over one year on. It contains examples of practice across Europe and aims to assist Universities in strategic planning and the practical steps they need to take to create the conditions that can encourage societal impact via co-creation.

This paper explores the meaning of co-production and the benefits it can bring to public services. The paper also diagnoses why public service reform is stalled, and why a radically new approach - sharing the design and delivery of services with users - can break this logjam and make services more effective for the public, more cost-effective for policymakers, and more sustainable for all of us.

Although co-production is recommended when involving people in research, methods for involving people are usually designed and managed by researchers and there is little evidence about methods to co-produce models for effective public and patient involvement. We report the method used by a group of patient and carer service users to develop and implement a model for involving public members in research.

Coproduction with people and communities needs to be part of a radical change in healthcare leadership and management, away from doing things ‘to’ or even ‘for’ people and towards a new model of leading ‘with’ others, putting people and neighbourhoods at the heart of a new systems leadership, focussing on what really matters.

The importance of including members of the public has been accorded a significant position in health planning, service delivery and research. But this position masks a lack of clarity about terms that are used. This paper identifies terms that are in common use in the lexicon of community based involvement and engagement in health with the intention of clarifying meaning and thus reducing ambiguity.

This comprehensive research in the UK to investigate how ‘co-production’ captures and develops the vital contribution people outside paid work make to their neighbourhoods. In keeping with the concept of co-production, people outside paid work in each of the local communities received training enabling them to work as researchers on the project.

This paper moves the discussion to a practical level, proposing actions that can be taken to implement evidence successfully in complex systems. Key to success is working with, rather than trying to simplify or control, complexity. The integrated actions relate to co-producing knowledge, establishing shared goals and measures, enabling leadership, ensuring adequate resourcing, contributing to the science of knowledge-to-action, and communicating strategically.

Paper exploring power relations in patient and public involvement (PPI) in research, particularly how patients may wield symbolic capital to develop a more equal relationship.

Paper about service coproduction, elucidating the behaviors through which customers strive toward adherence. It integrates services and medical perspectives to develop a novel theoretical framework of adherence as a nested system of coproduction behaviors, characterized by temporal and scope dimensions, utilizing a qualitative approach.

Editorial about mental health services in England, arguing that co-production needs to be seen in mental health as part of that long-run debate about what a mental health care system should be like that I discussed in the introduction.

This paper develops a critique of the current model of research governance ethics which casts communities as vulnerable subjects. It uses the insights of coproduction as a way of positively rethinking the relationship between researchers and ‘the researched’ to create new ways of thinking about public value.

An editorial about new collection highlights the role of co-production in strengthening health systems.

An illustrative case study examining what the theory of co-production adds to understanding of processes of knowledge creation and translation we observed in one of the Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care.

This paper summarises a CGAP roundtable discussion held on the 2nd of November 2011 at Cass Business School, London, as part of the 9th ESRC Festival of Social Science. The event brought together academics and third sector practitioners to share their experiences of co-producing research and to consider the benefits and challenges that joint academic-voluntary sector research presents to both sides.

Fundamental principles of participatory research, such as democratic-theory considerations, the concept of "safe space," participation issues, and ethical questions. The article also focuses on practical research considerations regarding the role and tasks of the various participants; specific methodological approaches; and quality criteria—understood here in the sense of arguments justifying a participatory approach.

A prospective study across five European countries, (the Netherlands, Spain, Hungary, Germany and the UK), showing how even well-planned engagement activities can be diverted within the existing research funding and research production systems where non-research stakeholders remain at the margins and can even be seen as a threat to academic identify and autonomy.

Drawing on the expertise of 36 co-production practitioners in the field of sustainability research, the blog article presents a new working definition of co-produced research and suggests how different elements of successfully co-produced knowledge can be understood and evaluated.

The authors of this paper outline that Patient and public involvement (PPI) in research has evolved over recent years, yet it often remains an ‘optional extra’ and, in some cases, tokenistic. Discussions are often focused on processes and methods, and are yet to make Patient and public involvement the norm; the authors argue that the conversation needs to change to one of ‘value’: a culture of common values and principles across all types of research.

The article examines the constraints that exist when trying to share power, informed by multidisciplinary theories of power. To bring co-production principles into practice, changes are needed within research practices, cultures and structures; in understandings of what knowledge is and how different forms of knowledge are valued. The article outlines challenges and tensions when co-producing research and describes potential ideas and resources that may help to put co-production principles into practice.

This special issue derives from a workshop at the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in April 2017. The papers form part of a special issue about co-production from the Social Policy & Administration journal.

The special issue chapter of ‘Inside co-production: Ruling, resistance, and practice' (edited by Bevir et al. in Social Policy & Administration, 2019 - also available in this library) called for a ‘decentring of co-production’ by focusing attention on elite narratives, local traditions and resistance, and meaningful practices. The authors of this paper continue the analysis of these themes by highlighting what they view as important distinctions between co-production and Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in applied health research.

The articles in the special issue (of which this chapter is part of) offer critical accounts of co-production in a range of policy domains, setting the elite narratives alongside local traditions and practices of resistance. For full chapter list search 'Special Issue: Inside Co-production'.

This paper explores the development of a novel co-produced methodology to understand ‘real-world’ help-seeking in online peer-peer communities by young people experiencing emotional abuse and neglect.

This co-produced research explored the experiences of young people seeking help for emotional abuse and neglect via an online, peer-peer message board. This practical case study aims to evidence the meaningful role and impacts associated with young co-researchers involvement in sensitive and complex mental health research using a flexible approach to co-production.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an experiment in research co-production in an evaluation of service planning at a London Mental Health NHS Trust. The paper aims to consider whether members of the research team who have themselves been users of mental health services are able to contribute to the research process as “experts by experience”, or if their experiential knowledge is “colonized” within the academic research team.

This article explores co-production in relation to autistic people. The authors reflect on the co-production process with autistic adults from the Authentistic Research Collective at University College London (one of the Co-Production Collective pilot projects). The authors reflect upon six elements that are of potential importance for future coproduction projects with autistic adults

This literature review was written as part of the project Co-Design: Learning Reflections, part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Connected Communities programme. At the beginning of 2013 the Connected Communities program awarded 10 projects under a funding call designed to encourage “creative, innovate and ethical” ways of conducting research with communities, rather than on communities. This review was written to act as a conversation starter in order to develop a common baseline for shared learning and cross-project discussion.

This paper proposes that co-production can be understood as an exploratory space and a generative process that leads to different, and sometimes unexpected, forms of knowledge, values, and social relations. By opening up this discussion, the authors hope to stimulate future debates on co-production as well as draw out ways of thinking differently about collaboration and participation in health care and research.

This paper highlights the benefits of co-production during covid-19 and calls for it to be become embedded in policy making

This paper explores how social science research and health care improvement practice were linked through a programme designed to broker collaborations between clinicians, academics, and patients to improve health care – the UK National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care for Northwest London. The authors discuss the successes and challenges of the collaboration and make suggestions on how to develop synergistic relationships that facilitate co-production of social science knowledge and its translation into practice.

This editorial argues that full partnership with patients is essential to any modern research enterprise

The authors present a series of reflections on experiments in co-production, each of which invites us to reflect on our own assumptions, and our own positions, in the shared project of using research to better address the problems that substance use can pose.

In this study investigating cancer care in prison, academic researchers collaborated with three Experts by Experience, or lived experience researchers, from Revolving Doors Agency (RDA). This paper aims to encourage others to harness the benefits of co-producing research with people with lived experience of health care in prison, in a safe and genuine way, by offering our reflections on the process.

Co-production needs to become an integral part of the training and funding of researchers to ensure research meets everyone’s needs, argue the writers of this paper. They go on to outline some of the key challenges facing the sector

Participatory approaches to developing health interventions with end-users are recommended to improve uptake and use. This work aimed to explore the experiences of co-designing an online-delivered pain management programme (iSelf-help) for people with persistent pain.

This collection brings together an outstanding range of the world's best scholars in the field of co-production. Focuses on the theoretical and empirical debates around the co-production of public services and outcomes. Highlights the evidence - and the evidence gaps - for the impact on public value of co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment

This contribution presents firstly some key findings from social innovation research in the field of public services, showing, by which recurring innovative features ‘co-productive’ service designs make a difference.

A piece of research that systematically maps the differences in how 32 initiatives from 6 continents co-produce diverse outcomes for the sustainable development of ecosystems at local to global scales

The authors argue that small changes as well as larger system-wide changes can strengthen citizens’ contribution to knowledge in health research. They state that co-production of research is key to achieving more equal relationships in global health research and to delivering positive benefits to a wide range of stakeholders

Ghana’s universal health insurance scheme provides a good example of co-production of research. This example shows the important role that co-production of health research can have in generating relevant evidence and innovative, context specific solutions for public health and clinical care challenges

Report about 5 pilot projects conducted by N8 Research