At the heart of the provider collaboratives is a commitment to engagement and co-production with our local communities, including individuals with lived experience of mental health issues, their families, and carers.
This means that these voices must be central in planning and governance, ensuring services meet the needs of those they support.
Despite the clear direction provided at a strategic level, national reports indicate challenges in achieving effective co-production. Barriers include unclear policies, lack of understanding, and resource constraints.
As a provider collaborative holding regional commissioning responsibilities, we felt that it was important for SupportED to lead by example and role model the changes we want to see when it came to shared decision making and true and meaningful co-production with people with lived experience.
This resulted in investment in leadership roles for those with lived experience, and the co-production of a recognition, remuneration and reward policy for those we co-produce with and who engage in our projects.
Prior to commencing work on developing a new recognition, reward and remuneration policy we scoped existing policies and reviewed national best practice guidance documents. We also held a number of focus groups both online and in person to collect valuable feedback from our local communities.
Our co-production working group for this project was made up of people with lived experience, clinicians, HR professionals, finance colleagues and staff from corporate services. True co-production was carried out at every level of decision-making, from how we remunerated individuals, to what activities we remunerated individuals for, how much we remunerated individuals and the support and training requirements for each activity.
This project is now in its final stages and we hope to be able to share a final draft with working group members in the very near future before sharing at relevant governance meetings for approval and sign off.