Co-production for dementia

Might this be the method for you?

Yes

• if you want to work with people affected by dementia as active partners in creating better outcomes for themselves, with the support of staff and their own networks.
• if you want to co-commission services by shifting your focus from to outcomes that local people perceive as being the priorities
• if you want to codesign services using  your service user and carer feedback to guide how to improve services, or develop new ones, in ways that matter to service users and carers.
• if you want to bring lived experience to staff and service user development: developing ways for people with dementia, and carers, to work with staff to deliver training and awareness sessions for health and care professionals
• if you want to involve people in assessing your services and environments in which you provide them
  • people with dementia and carers being enabled to carry out walk throughs audits and mystery shopping experiences – their lived experience of dementia may bring to light things other people may not have noticed or perceived as barriers.
  • People affected by dementia giving ratings of services including online.
• if you want to move away from a ‘them and us’ culture to working together with service users.
• if you are willing create the right conditions for co-production to become mainstream practice. For example to tweak organisation models for project management or information review, to build in time to enable co-production with people affected by dementia. 
• if you want to improve the dementia-awareness, health and well-being of people involved in the project and potentially future users of the information and services too.
• if you want to improve the ability of services to meet the needs of people under-represented in their services or with poorer outcomes associated with having limited health literacy such as lacking dementia-awareness.

Maybe 

• where people's dementia is progressing and you can involve them in ways that are sensitive to how their dementia affects them, and enabling people to share their experience and ideas even with progressive and significant levels of disability.

No

• where people would feel overwhelmed or distressed by the ask on them due to the level of their disability.

Useful link

Read more from the Centre for co-production at UCL