Ever wondered how to initiate co-production in your locality but for much wider impact?

By Jane Green, SCIE co-production steering group and trustee at SCIE

The context
A large national project to develop resources to help social workers, people and organisations to use the BASW Capabilities Statements for social work with autistic adults included the aim to embed the Capabilities in a social worker autism toolkit with autistic people and those with Learning Disabilities. 

We set up a focus group that was actually initiated by myself and a social worker from BASW with autistic adults in Sussex.  Now, you might say a focus group is not true co-production and of course you are right.  But this was part of the much larger national project.   To widen the scope,  I initiated  this task focus group to recognise a wider range of perspectives, knowledge and expertise.

Co-production Week 

Often the same group of people are surveyed or engaged in research, other studies, surveys or in some cases are spoken for  and I felt strongly that we needed to represent ourselves as actually autistic adults and not marginalised. 

Our task? Our focus?
Our task was to work on actually challenge ideas, review and refine the tools for the new toolkit.  This was key.   We focused on surveys already undertaken with social workers, Universities and colleges .  These helped focus on what was needed going forward. Importantly how to improve the experience of autistic adults and adults with learning disabilities. Minutes notes were taken and many post meeting communications followed. 

So how did it go?
I was concerned it wouldn’t be co-produced and we would be appendages to something already in use.  My colleagues were apprehensive about meeting up with new people they didn’t know, trusting me, trusting the social worker.  But we found it engaging, enlightening on both sides. So useful we kept talking over the allotted time, with the much needed sustenance of chocolate biscuits, fruit and coffee,  and followed up with further reflections and amendments. 

So often in autism training, products and initiatives the language is not always accepted by the autistic community and this can be a barrier.  While medically there is mandatory language , in social care we think it incredibly important to be cognisant of this barrier.

Accessibility and  communication was key and for those who felt unable to communicate at the time it was more than acceptable to feed back, which they did in depth in written form later.  It is important to note that autistic adults can initiate and run many co-production projects and challenges are surmounted in a more accessible and equitable way than in many other meetings or projects I’ve been involved in previously. Further to the initial Capabilities statement references we added physical health studies, a hypermobility toolkit  and key research that often seems to affect some autistic adults but often missed out.  

We felt there was a good relational trust between us all that is the basis of co-production and reciprocity. We would do it again and for some it was the first time they had been involved in co-production. 

The launch of the toolkit took place on 18.6.2020 links to all of the resources can be found here:

The resources are available on the BASW website:
• Capabilities Statement for adults with learning disability: Implementation resources 
• Capabilities Statement for autistic adults: Implementation resources
• Curriculum outlines of post-graduate qualification pathway:
o Social work with autistic adults
o Social work with adults with learning disability
Key words: BASW British Association of Social Workers

#autism
#reciprocity
#hypermobility
#toolkit
#physical health
#coproduction

Jane tweets @jgjanegreen