What does good collaboration and co-production look like?
It is important to collaborate with people who use your service and ensure that their views and experiences are used to shape your service.
This can be achieved in different ways and involves different levels of commitment. The diagram below provides some examples of ways of collaborating with people with learning disabilities to design services:
Level 3
Genuine sharing of decision making power
Level 2
Involved all the way through designing services but the final decision rests with professionals
Level 1
Not involved in the design of services, but asked to provide feedback and comments, for example, through consultations, feedback and questionnaires
At each stage you will require to:
- listen to what people tell you about your services and respond to their feedback
- invest time to involve people in open and inclusive discussions
- share decision-making power equally with the people who use your services. This is sometimes called co-production.
In the simplest of terms, co-production means professionals working with people with lived experience to do or change something.
Co-production can be achieved by acting together on an equal basis where everyone can contribute their lived experience, skills and ideas about what works to create positive change.
By working together to make decisions about the way services are designed, commissioned and delivered, co-production can support your organisation to make improvements at individual and system-wide levels.
The difference between collaboration and co-production is that co-production involves sharing decision-making power with service users. By shifting this balance of power youcan achieve better outcomes for the people you support, as well as the services that support them.
It may be that your organisation only supports a small number of women with learning disabilities sporadically and over a limited period of time. In these situations full co-production may be difficult for a number of reasons. Here are some things that might help:
- collaborating with women with learning disabilities who have used your service in the last year or more
- collaborating with advocacy organisations that are led by, or support, victim/survivors with learning disabilities
- collaborating with similar organisations to your own, to invite women with learning disabilities to evaluate and advise on the accessibility of your services. In these situations, it will be important to co-ordinate this well to avoid causing any additional trauma from repeatedly re-telling, and re-living their experiences.
The challenge is to ensure that any collaborative or co-produced work is inclusive, accessible and that decisions are shared equally. For information and advice about communicating and supporting women with learning disabilities to make decisions, see Priority 2: Decision-making.
