Co-producing practice research

Dr Kayonda Ngamaba, a researcher at the International Centre for Mental Health Social Research, shares some thoughts about co-production from our Connecting People Implementation study.

Co-production

In recent years, researchers have witnessed a shift toward the voices, views and experiences of service users, carers and ‘the public’ being increasingly important in the development of health and social care services, treatment plans and research, he writes.

Connecting People was co-produced with service users and practitioners, so it was only appropriate for a study of its implementation to be similarly co-produced.

Implementation study

The Connecting People Implementation study was co-developed to explore the barriers and facilitators to implementing Connecting People in community mental health teams in England.

We worked with the McPin Foundation to bring together a team of researchers, service users and practitioners to co-produce implementation materials. These aimed to support service users and practitioners understand what Connecting People was and how the model worked. 

We co-produced a pack of materials which consisted of:

• a fold-out leaflet which provided a brief guide to Connecting People;
• a practice guidance brochure which covered the eight steps of the model in depth;
• an implementation manual to support the organisations using it;
• and a training manual which set out ways of delivering training in Connecting People and included example exercises for teams to work through during training sessions.

Once the implementation pack was produced, the working group transitioned into an advisory group. The advisory group advised on several topics including site recruitment; what qualitative interview questions should be asked of service user participants at six-month follow-up; data analysis ; and ideas for dissemination of study findings.

The advisory group took part in several sessions to disseminate the findings of the study including a webinar and symposium at the 9th International Conference on Social Work in Health and Mental Health.

Evaluation

We underestimated the time that co-production processes take. It took much longer than anticipated to co-produce the implementation pack, which impacted on the set-up of the research phase of the project and recruitment of the sites.

I felt like we made group decisions. I felt like I had [an] equal partner role.

Member of the co-production group

However, it was worthwhile to take time to develop the materials together. The in-depth iterative process has produced a pack of materials which will outlast the study. They can be downloaded for free at connectingpeople.net.

Our experiences are discussed in full in chapter 29 of the Routledge Handbook of Social Work Practice Research, which we wrote with Nicola Moran, Harminder Dosanjh Kaur, David Morris, Victoria Nunn, E. Thomas and Keith J. Thompson.