Co-production at Mind

As part of SCIE’s Co-production week on 1-5th July 2019 we are holding a staff event on 3rd July at our head offices in Stratford to highlight the many positives and benefits of co-producing work and sharing power. It is a big part of our values and goals at Mind to involve people who experience mental health problems in all of our work and something that we aim to continuously develop.

Co-production is an increasingly common concept in the influence & participation work that we do at Mind, as well as for organisations that we work with. For us the difference between co-production and other methods of influence and participation that we use is that in co-production people with lived experience play an equal role in both designing and delivering work, rather than making suggestions that professionals are responsible for deciding upon and implementing. Here at Mind we would like to see this happening where ever possible in our work.

With this in mind we will be co-producing our co-production event aimed at the increasing number of staff at Mind head offices to attend. Seven people with lived experience are joining myself and three Mind Influence & Participation Coaches to design and deliver the event. As we work together we we are starting to see what we want the key outcomes to be, what the event will look like and how it will be delivered - so watch this space….

To help with our work around involving people Mind has created an Influence & Participation Toolkit which is a comprehensive resource designed to develop understanding and support the meaningful involvement of people with lived experience of a mental health problems in the development of organisations and their services. It is available publicly for anyone to use and can be found here.

 We are always looking for examples of good practise from different organisations including examples around co-production so if you have a piece of work that would make a good case study then please do get in touch with us at LivedExp@mind.org.uk

 Current case studies about co-production can be seen here.

Care to Listen Podcast: A Co-pro Case Study

Care to Listen by Five Rivers

Produced by care experienced young people, Care to Listen is a powerful podcast series. We hear first-hand experiences of what it is like to live and work in the care system.

In a bid to dispel myths, reduce stigma and support positive change, the podcast series was created and led by members of the Five Rivers’ Youth Council. It was important that they led the agenda. They decided whom to interview, what to ask and, crucially, how to edit the series to ensure key themes and ideas were broadcast.

This creative project has the support of the Children’s Commissioner, which will help to support the change needed to address some of the issues faced by society’s most vulnerable people.

Read the full case study on the SCIE site

Listen to the podcast

Sharing Power at People First

By Gina Barrett and Jennifer Taylor from People First Lambeth

Gina: ‘Having power gives me a good boost. In my life I haven’t had power. I learned it step by step, going to People First Lambeth and going to different meetings about powering people with learning difficulties to have power. Having power is taking charge of different things I want to do, having a say over what to do in my life and taking charge in my life’.

Jen: ‘We do a project called Supporting Each Other Equals Power. People First Self-advocacy helps people to sort out their problems like benefits and housing and to find work. Our bit is supporting people to go and do socialising that they want to do in the community, like our dance or afternoon tea and morning coffee. But if they want to go to the theatre or the art gallery or anything that suits them we support them to do that. Sometimes they come in and see us if they want to have a chat or do art with us. SCIE helped us to raise the money for the project. They are partners in the project as well’.

Gina: ‘Basically, they help us to run the project and look after the money’.

Gina: ‘We share power with different organisations when we do projects together. We work with lots of different organisations and we like to have equal control from the very beginning, from the start to the end’.

Jen: ‘That means we plan everything together and we make decisions together and decide what should go on in the project. We look at what’s working well and what’s not working well. We do writing the reports about what goes on in the projects. We decide how we should spend the money on the projects, like the financial side of it’.

Gina: ‘They can’t do it without us because we know what it’s like to be a person with learning difficulties. We know better than people without learning difficulties what we need, what we want, what’s wrong with services, when we’re treated bad and what services are good for us.

Gina: ‘So it’s very important that people do listen to us, what we’ve got to say, and treat us with respect as a person and don’t look down on us, like some people do, who think they know it all, but they don’t.

Co-production and Quality Improvement – Camden & Islington Recovery College

By Ksenija Kadic & Anne Prouse

All Camden & Islington (C&I) Recovery College courses are co-produced and co-delivered by a peer tutor (expert by experience) and a C&I Trust staff professional tutor (expert by profession).  We have trained psychologists, social workers, nurses, researchers, and managers to co-produce with us as professional tutors. 

Fewer Trust staff teach with us, relatively speaking, than other UK Recovery Colleges.  Unfortunately, we struggle to have C&I staff released to co-produce with us, especially for longer courses. Over the last five years, the College has grown significantly but we can’t offer all the courses we would like to, as we do not have enough staff tutors. 

C&I staff who co-produce and teach with us tell us they do find it valuable. ‘[It] has taught me a lot and encouraged me to reflect on how I work with people’ and ‘[I now] approach work in a more collaborative way.’

In February 2019, we set up a Quality Improvement (QI) project to explore ways to encourage more C&I staff to co-produce recovery and wellbeing courses with us.

Our aims

• Promote co-production & teaching for personal & professional development
• Transform C&I Trust culture through co-production and recovery model
• Invest in staff skills & knowledge

Our SMART goal

To increase the number of C&I staff teaching at the Recovery College by 20% by October 2019.

Our team

We invited students and C&I staff tutors to join our QI team to co-produce  ideas.   Our team was two students, three C&I tutors and a research manager, led by the College Deputy Manager/Senior Tutor and with a C&I QI Hub member.

We shared our own stories, and discussed why the Recovery College is a place where C&I staff would want to co-produce and teach. We collected stories from C&I staff tutors and student stories on how our co-produced recovery courses had helped them.  We presented our project to C&I leaders and it was well-received.

What happens now

As senior C&I leaders have shown support for our project, we feel confident we will soon be welcoming more C&I Trust staff to co-produce with us.

Working well Together at National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health

By Steph de la Haye, National Advisor at NCCMH and Co-production Working Group

NCCMH have taken on the mantle of developing co-production in all its facets, and their genuine commitment to make it real has driven Working Well Together, the paper on co-production and mental health commissioning, which was published on 10th May.

The first thing to state is that the team was made up of more people with personal experience of mental health distress and using services than there were professionals, although many had both hats.

One area of discussion during the development of this paper was around establishing key principles for co-production, which came down to:

Click on the image for a larger version

Another central conversation in the development of this paper was about ensuring that we acknowledge the range of involvement and engagement - as well as acknowledging that co-production may not fix everything! Co-production should, however, run through all work streams as a ‘golden thread’, from the start.

Recognising power is fundamental and something that everyone within teams, services and organisations needs to do, and support the equalisation of. Accessibility is another key factor that can create a level playing field for all people, while recognising the equalities and inequities that people experience.

NCCMH already models what we want commissioners to do. By being open to improvements and individual requests, they have made the process of co-production more inclusive while being aware that more can be done. This is the mindset we hope others will take on. 

A member of the co-production working group said:
“I couldn’t have got to the meetings at all without taxis and 2 nights in a hotel, for a 2-hour meeting. This commitment of resource meant someone who would otherwise not have been at the table at all was able to attend.”

Another person reflected on the support they were given so that they could continue to access benefits while being involved in co-production: 
“Being on Employment and Support Allowance was also a barrier to being able to take part. While I worked hard and earned my payments, the flexibility of expectations, the low frequency of meetings and the level of support I needed to engage with the process couldn't really be reproduced in a job. Involvement in work like this shouldn't be used to assess capacity to work. Even though they had no experience doing this before, NCCMH agreed to write a supporting letter to be sent in with my permitted work form.

"This flexible approach of listening to what I needed is a vital part of working well together, inclusively.”

Creating the space for effective co-production based, power sharing

By Richard Field and Clive Miller – Independent consultants

Co-production is more than a practice innovation. It’s a total shift in the way the world is understood to work. This is the bedrock on which the new set of working relationships, with power-sharing at its centre, will be built.

Co-production understands that services do not produce outcomes. Instead it is what people and communities do alongside organisations that together produce outcomes. This has always been the case but has either not been recognised or taken into account in conventional practice. Hence the opportunity for people and community to be effective co-producers with practitioners continues to be missed. The result has been both the ineffective and inefficient use of the collective assets of people, communities and organisations.

What is now needed is large scale change that uses the learning from the many examples of innovative co-productive practices to completely transform all conventional practice to being co-production based. This is not a theoretical musing. Wholesale ‘re-imagining of social care’ is already starting to happen in places as diverse as Somerset, Thurrock and Wigan.

It works by devolving power:

·       A new relationship - ‘re-defining the relationship between councils and residents. For example, the Wigan Deal.

·       Community anchored support - ‘A clear sighted commitment to foster development of services and support, often small-scale, which is anchored in the community’.

·       Permission - ‘Senior managers creating a permissive framework that creates the expectation and provides support for practitioners to work in imaginative person and community-centred ways’.

At whatever scale co-production is being introduced, if power sharing is to become a reality it will also require a new ways of exercising power, including a new model of leadership with its own unique set of terms and conditions. SCIE trustee Alex Fox identifies some of them:

·       What. Stop believing in ‘heroic leadership’ the ‘inspirational leader who turns around a troubled organisation’. This is the opposite of the power sharing culture that underpins co-production.

·       Who. No diversity, no power sharing

·       What. ‘Co-production can only work where there are people with lived experience in a position to co-produce’.

The context within which power sharing takes place has a major impact on its outcomes. Hence the commissioning process also requires wholesale change. The many different individual innovations that comprise asset-based commissioning show what is needed.

Now is the time to bring them together as a connected set to deliver the new model of power sharing, at scale.  

Three key shifts will be:

Focus and how outcomes are perceived to be produced

Collaborate with people and communities as equal decision makers.

A fundamental shift in the relationship between commissioners, people, communities and suppliers.  

None of the above will happen unless there is system-wide change in both practice and commissioning. True co-production.

Sharing Power through Sharing Stories

By Flexible Films, a video production group working with SCIE

Sharing the power in filming creates interesting and captivating content. We would highly recommend it!

When we first started filmmaking in 2002, we were a bit nervous about doing this as we thought that things had to be exact and technical. There was an element of us wanting to take full control to make sure that the filming sessions were focussed and thorough. We learnt a lot through our mental health filmmaking group, which was a collective made up of people using mental health services. They helped us realise that it's better to include all those involved and to give them as much control as feasible.

We have since learnt that:

• Those being filmed should hold the power as it is their story.
• By sharing the power, this makes for honest and open footage.
• Taking ideas from others makes the films richer and more interesting.
• A collective process means that people have more ownership.
• The completed films are more real and engaging as a result.

We are learning all the time and at the start of each project, we leave ourselves open to new possibilities. Because of changing technologies, this can make sharing of power in film easier to achieve. For example, in this year's SCIE co-production festival, there are five volunteers who will be filming interviews with their Smart phones. We will train them how to do this as it is important that technical needs are met. Having co-production members interview delegates will give the interviews a new look and feel. It will also mean that the content is different because members are asking the questions. We are excited at this new prospect and look forward to the festival.