What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there seems to be an increasing ability for organisations and decision makers at a “system” level to see past the barriers to working collaboratively with communities and community based organisations and work effectively together. This has been manifest to a greater or lesser extent in a number of emerging projects locally, including the amplification of local voices during:

– The co-design of a new pathway for mental health crisis support;

– A joint initiative to deliver locally against the national Healthy Holidays funding for low income families;

– Collaborative work across sectors around health inequalities in relation to diabetes.

(quotes / data to be added to support these)

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project sets out to focus on the positive changes seen across Sheffield in relation to co-production and public engagement, especially at a voluntary and community level, since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is with a view to understanding how these changes can be maintained at a local and national level so that recommendations can be made for next steps.

This project aims to work across Sheffield City Region to capture the essence of what is making these positive changes successful, and work with local partners to c0-design ways to extend and build on this good practice. Our experience suggests that placing marginalised people and communities in positions of greater influence within health care infrastructure can lead to reductions in health inequalities. We think that by hearing directly from people and organisations what has gone well in this context, we’ll be able to help catalyse more successes.

How will the project be delivered?

PEOPLE

Co:Create have between us 30+ years experience using co-production mindset and methods to evaluate and shape change. We’ve recently been working across England with primary care networks and we’d love to bring some of this experience back to Sheffield where we live, use it to fertilise some of the great things happening locally and share the learning via Q.

METHODS

Co:Create aim to consolidate some of our recent learning from work across Primary Care and communities in Cornwall, Morecambe Bay, Leicester and Sheffield, using realist evaluation and co-design principles to establish a detailed understanding of what’s happened and what could come next.

Surveys

Open questions widely distributed via a range of media / options for completion to establish broad themes and identify potential interviewees.

Interviews

10 – 15 semi-structured interviews to be conducted remotely with a representative sample of people / roles / organisations involved or affected.

Co-design

Remote workshop(s) to develop themes into workable concepts.

How is your project going to share learning?

The project will benefit from Co:Create’s work nationally with NHS England exploring the use of co-production and asset based community development in primary care networks. We plan to apply some of the innovations we’ve tested and developed in that work to this project, so the learning we develop and share will include not only what we find within this project, but our wider work and recent experience.

We will share learning by offering:

Hosted group sessions sharing the themes and learning from our project, including recommendations for those planning similar work

1:1 or smaller group remote sessions for those interested who would like to explore aspects of the project for use in their own work

Interactive webinar(s) via the NHS England Engagement Practitioners Network

Feeding in our learning to Sheffield based DfE Health Holidays development work hosted by Voluntary Action Sheffield