Co-production in Hampshire

By Robert Droy (Chair of Hampshire’s Personalisation Expert Panel) and Graham Allen (Director of Adult’s Health and Care, Hampshire County Council) 

The timing of SCIE’s first ever co-production week presents us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on why we feel in Hampshire that it is so important to work collaboratively to solve the issues that we face together.

As the song goes 'breaking up is hard to do', in our experience, working together can be just as tough, particularly during difficult times. It takes courage and determination but it also takes mutual respect. 

Too often it can feel like service users and carers find themselves on one side of the argument with health and social care professionals on the other side.

It is true to say that we all have different roles to play, different experiences, and different approaches to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead; as the scale of the task increases, we must approach these with a renewed commitment to work together, to listen to each other, to seek the views of a diverse, and sometimes divided, community,  and to focus on the most pragmatic solutions for all of us.

In Hampshire, over the last decade, we have tried to put our differences aside and tried to develop a different kind of conversation. A conversation that is realistic, grounded, pragmatic and one that focusses on our shared values and principles. The principles of choice and control are non-negotiable for service users, but how we achieve that is up for discussion. On the flip side, both 

Health and Social Care have to do more with less. Many people may not like to hear that, but it is the reality of the situation we find ourselves in.

Currently, we each, as individuals, have the right to be involved in the decisions about how our own care needs are met, and as a collective we have the responsibility to ensure our contributions to discussions about the wider system lead to the best possible outcomes for all citizens.

This is where co-production comes in. By working together we can try to achieve a solution that maintains those principles. That's why co-production can sometimes be slow, it can be frustrating, but it can also be incredibly rewarding when an agreement is reached. We need to be honest that it doesn't always work but that doesn't mean we should stop trying.

A former colleague once said: “We will always have goals and targets, some we will miss and some we will reach, but what really matters is how well we work together”. 
For us, that sums co-production up perfectly.