Collaboration through Co-production in 2023

Collaboration for the best outcomes within adult social care is at the heart of IMPACT’s work. It forms our approach with our partner Universities, host organisations, and stakeholders. An asset to the approach is the input from our Co-production Advisory Group. The group comprises of 10 members with lived experience of drawing on care and support or as an unpaid carer, supported by Lived Experience Engagement Lead, Karen McCormick. They represent a diverse intersection of lived experience and are always open to improvement in their efforts for equality, diversity, and inclusion.

• Embedding strategy
• Accessibly communications and website re-development
• Evaluation strategy
• Recruitment processes
• Developed co-production induction materials
• Marketing communications
• Co-design and delivery of IMPACT Staff Away Day on Co-production

I wanted to update you as well as I have taken up so much of the advice from the coproduction group for the policy and practice roundtables wanted to thank the group for their insights. It has really transformed the focus of the events and we have much more of a focus on a) lived experience b) how lived experience makes it into policy, practice, and c) making the format accessible and available to more people.  I found it such a useful addition. We have also had some input into the planning of the events from the group but also lived experience from outside of IMPACT

Laura Griffith, Deputy Head of National Embedding

Building and maintenance of relationships and mutual respect continues to be the fundamental success of the Co-production Advisory Group in 2023. We have achieved our intention of developing from our initial scope to increase paid participation of members across the IMPACT work programmes by 83%.  We continue to stretch the co-production conversation safely and authentically. 

We believe that we can better connect to and support the working of the Assemblies with more visibility of lived experience members in each of the regions. We believe we can support the work of promoting and embedding IMPACT through regional lived experience networks. This is an area we would like to explore in 2024.   

We have a methodology that works for our meetings. However, we acknowledge that we need to find a better way of measuring the outcomes of the work plan and how this helps with strategic co-production and practice. 

We are proud of the fact that a suggestion from our reflections in 2022 was endorsed by senior leadership and we co-designed and led the delivery of the Co-production Away Day in Stirling in November.

We continue to tell our co-production story on social media, at online and in person events. We believe that we have a positive role to play in supporting the brand development and embedding work of IMPACT across the UK. IMPACT has made progress on accessibility and work is ongoing in this area to ensure that all the IMPACT message is understood by all stakeholders. We have made progress on feedback loops, and we acknowledge that we need to do more work on this supported by wider IMPACT staff in terms of reciprocity of effort.  If we can develop a way to measure the value and impact of the contributions of the work of the Co-production Advisory Group, we believe this will be of mutual benefit, not only to team members but also of strategic benefit to IMPACT.  We are looking forward to having administrative support for our work in 2024.