What a fantastic day! Ending with the football and beginning with a great Co-Production Festival in London.

Today’s Co-Production Festival hosted by SCIE was a great experience. We attended with people we support and staff. The workshops, discussion panels and shows were inspiring. A highlight of course, was meeting the very talented @LostVoiceGuy, Lee Ridley.

Here is some of our account of the day:

Workshop 1

We attended a workshop led by Tina Coldham which included shared information on:

• Innovation
  
• Communication
  
• Partnership working
  
• Funding and budget cuts
  
• Understanding what co-production is
  

People felt that awareness was increasing, but co-production by local authorities is patchy and could benefit from unified thinking and approaches. Yet, there should be a balance to ensure that defining co-production doesn’t stifle creativity and decrease innovation.

There was a focus on understanding illnesses AND individuals and recognising that emotional support is a care need.

We found it useful to learn about the principles of co-production, which are:

• Equality
  
• Diversity
  
• Accessibility
  
• Reciprocity
  

(that's EDAR – for those acronym enthusiasts out there!)

For anyone who needs a business case to get buy-in for co-production, we learnt some points to share with your SMT:

Savings in prevention – it allows us to take action before a person gets worse - for example the People Powered Health Programme by NESTA.

Costs – the jury is currently out on whether overall co-production is more costly than business as usual. Watch this space for future research

SCIE also held a Co-production webinar earlier this week whereby attendees were able to vote on how to take co-production forward. The most helpful part was sharing information over the webinar’s chat function – in true co-production style. Here are some of the links we learnt:

· Co-production project planner

·There is funding available right now for co-production projects

· A great document by Turning Point Scotland on ‘Service User Involvement’ good practice.

·And of course, there is a lot of information on SCIE’s Co-Production webpage

There is another webinar later this week. We would highly recommend you sign up for it here.

Good luck with your co-production journey and roll on the World Cup Semi-Finals!