Resources for co-producing research

We want to help everyone share power more effectively when working together on health and social care research.

Co-producing research is when researchers, practitioners and members of the public collaborate to develop research.

The aim is to get everyone to work together in more equal partnerships and share responsibility and power throughout the research project. However, there are many factors that affect how we work together, such as hierarchies in universities and in the NHS, unfair treatment of people and unequal distribution of wealth.

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) guidance indicates that sharing power is an important, yet challenging principle in co-producing research.

We worked together with people who have been involved in co-production to jointly create:

• a map of resources to guide researchers, professionals and public contributors through the different tools and guidance that can help people produce research together. This includes tools to support remote co-production, on p.13-18
• reflective questions to help everyone think about how they can work with people more equally through a process of co-produced research, including considerations to think through, when involving people remotely
• a training course “Co-production in health and social care research”. Feedback from participants included that: “I’m inspired to look at working in co-production projects – I like the creativity and more egalitarian approach to creating knowledge”; “Overall was excellent”; “I feel inspired just to try something”. We are developing an online version of this course and will be advertising future dates.

Commentary article published

Co-authored with two public contributors who were involved in our project and workshops, in a published commentary article we bring together key tips that might help when co-producing research. This includes thinking about who is involved and when in a co-production project, and how to navigate challenges with respect to communication and relationships. In our project we found it difficult to bring all co-production principles into practice, as they are highly aspirational. It is helpful to be honest about the difficulties this way of working involves, and we include reflections on this in the article.