I am one of many service users who are concerned about the increasing adoption of co-production as a term whilst not really practicing it at all. These are the organisations who might bring in someone to do co-production on a project or for a short time, make lots of noise about it through their publicity, and then revert back to the normal hierarchical way of working with just token service user involvement.
They really do not get it.
I am wary of naming organisations, but I recently went to a meeting in an organisation that has claimed it has co-production at its heart. But when they were challenged about some recent examples of where they had done things without telling us, let alone consulting us, the manager said that they had not done so because co-production was too expensive!
We are in this terrible situation of having been engaged to co-produce and yet we are being ignored.
But because they have kept us loosely engaged, in that we are on an email list and get notified of meetings, they still claim they are co-producing! When we go to the meetings it is usually a surprise to find out what decisions have been made about us and without us. Our influence isn't really there, as shown by the manager's response to the query above.
I appreciate SCIE asking for our experiences because it is important to learn from our bad experiences as well as the good ones. Sometimes pointing out what co-production is not can prevent other organisations new to the concept from making the same mistakes.
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