This Co-production Week, we’re celebrating the power of partnership in creating better health and care services.  

To mark the week, we have published some insights from our Learning and Development programme. We’ve spoken to people whose work has been shaped by user involvement, and you can view their stories through blogs, videos, and interviews on our Co-production Week hub: info.picker.org/coproweek2026.

Meaningful changes

In a Q&A, Clair le Boutillier, who works on support for people who have had or are living long-term with cancer, gives examples of how medical language can be confusing and inaccessible for patients.

 “[Co-production] led us to rethink how personalised care planning is offered,” she writes. “Some patients thought the offer could be improved – it was too jargony, patients didn’t understand what the intervention was about, and didn’t know if it was for them.” 

Working with patients, and properly understanding people’s lived experiences has helped pinpoint where changes can be made. Often they are quite simple things, like using different media to present information more clearly, or finding more accessible language to describe services. While the approach can feel radical, the implementation of what we learn doesn’t need to be. 

Sinead Rothrie, a speech and language therapist working with people impacted by treatments for head and neck cancer, found that co-designed improvements to services led to better experience of care, both for patients and the staff supporting them. Speaking with our Learning and Development Lead, Naomi Stockley, she explains that the co-design process revealed how a neat categorisation of stages along the care pathway (that is, how professionals think about care) was not meaningful for patients. This led to improvements in the consistency of information provided by staff across the continuum of patients’ experiences.  

Beyond tokenism 

Saira Nazeer is a critical care research therapist at Barts Health NHS Trust, working to support people who have experienced critical care. In her blog, she writes about how co-design made a difference to a project to improve ongoing support for this group. For co-production to be truly meaningful, she tells us, you need to do it properly: 

“Sometimes people want to just ‘do a bit of co-design’ - maybe resulting in some tokenistic community engagement,” she writes. “But EBCD [Experience-Based Co-Design] works to truly centre the voice of those with lived experience.” 

For many practitioners, it’s a leap to move beyond ‘doing a bit of co-design’ to truly embracing the co-production process. Part of the answer is to find a methodology that works. EBCD offers an approach that helps to deepen engagement by providing a structured process for working with patients, families, and carers.

Genuine partnerships 

We know intuitively that understanding service users’ needs equips us to make more effective changes. But it can be difficult to make this happen. There are logistical challenges to overcome - how, practically, do you create space for conversations to take place in the midst of busy work schedules? - but more profound is the power dynamic between those providing and those receiving services. 

Sinead reflects that patients in her project welcomed the opportunity to participate with practitioners, and to do so as valued, respected peers. She comments that the co-design process was in itself therapeutic: it led not only to practical changes, but also to a shift in the culture of care through the shared endeavour.

As we mark Co-production Week, we reflect on what can be achieved through processes like Experience-Based Co-Design, and other practices that bring patients and carers together. As Naomi reminds us during her conversation with two inspirational practitioners, it’s less important to focus on the differences between co-production, co-design, and co-creation - it’s the ‘co’ part that should be the priority. What really matters isn’t the label, but a genuine willingness to share power between the people who provide services and those who use them.

We offer training in EBCD, for individuals via our online or in-person open courses, or for groups and organisations as part of bespoke work.