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True co-production through education

Bringing patients and staff together through Quality Improvement and OD training to create the psychological safety required for true co-production.

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  • Proposal
  • 2019

What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to your chosen theme?

North Cumbria is undergoing an unprecedented period of change, it was one of the exemplar Integrated Care Systems (ICS) announced in Wave 2 in 2018 and will shortly complete the formal merger of the two main provider Trusts, and is working through the role of the CCG in this new integrated landscape. Our goal is to put co-production at the heart of everything we do – something championed by the CCG and in pockets of services but is not yet embedded as the way we do things across the wider system. Patients and their representatives will be part of all service redesign and improvement work as we move to a more integrated health and system. Previous work has shown that there is a knowledge and language gap when engaging with patients and we would like to use our existing training programmes to enable improved communication and increased psychological safety so our patients can be more engaged in the process.

What does your project aim to achieve?

By providing training in service improvement and organisational development to our patients, service users and their representatives and community leaders we plan to encourage shared learning and use of a common language. We hope to encourage greater understanding and shared learning of both lived and technical experience to provide the psychological and emotional safety for both staff and patients to fully participate in service improvement and development together.

In simple terms we would like to create change and improvement teams that are made up not only of staff but also patients and service users. As well as putting patients at the centre of our thoughts we want to have patients at the centre of our improvement design and implementation.

How will the project be delivered?

CLIC, our Cumbria Learning and Improvement Collaborative, is a shared “umbrella” initiative which exists to develop a positive transformation in health and social care across north Cumbria. One of its key aims is to lead and embed a culture of co-production for continuous learning, continuous improvement, and living within our means – with our people and for our people.

CLIC runs a variety of courses that cover quality improvement, OD, clinical skills and leadership which are open to any health, social care and third sector employee and have been attended by patient representatives. These courses and workshops can be seen as not being accessible to patients and service users so we will develop a communications plan to engage, and run extra courses and workshops designed for both staff and patients. In order to assist with this we plan to employ an Improvement Support Officer as a development role to work with Continuous Service Improvement facilitators to develop and improve capacity.

What and how is your project going to share learning throughout?

Julie is the Head of Communications and Engagement for North Cumbria CCG and has responsibility for co-production within the North Cumbria Health and Care network. She has worked extensively with our community and third sector partners over a number of years and we plan to use her expertise and networks to publicise the project as well as share our learning.

We intend to have a blog documenting our progress on the CLIC website with a view to creating a case study at the end of the project’s initial run. We hope to be able to share this blog to the Q website and show our learning as well as eliciting suggestions as to how we may improve as we fully expect this to be an iterative process.

It is our intention that the non NHS attendees of our courses will not only use their knowledge to aid in specific improvements but also to educate their friends in local communities as to how they too can become involved in co-producing the future of their services.

How you can contribute

  • Their experiences with successful co-production
  • Ideas on attracting 'lay people'

Plan timeline

1 Jun 2010 Review of feedback from 3 months of courses
1 Jul 2019 6 month review and report
1 Nov 2019 Post out to advert
1 Dec 2019 Interview and appoint
1 Jan 2020 Approximate start date and training
1 Feb 2020 Refine and adjust training materials
1 Mar 2020 Begin first training courses
1 Oct 2020 9 month review and reflective log
31 Dec 2020 1 year review and case study

Comments

  1. The importance of increasing co production cannot be ignored and it's fantastic to see plans for a local initiative. Local volunteer services could be a good place to attract members of the public and their families.

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