What Makes Co - Production different from participation?

I think anybody can participate, but co-production is about joint power joint working, you know, genuine coming together and respecting each other’s areas of expertise and making joint decisions. I think participation is simply bums on seats, somebody happened to be there. We all know that there’s many different ways that you can consult and have service user involvement, but it doesn’t mean to say that you have shared that power, doesn’t mean to say that you really have taken on board what people say, you’ve just listened to what people say but you can then ignore it if you want to. Whereas co-production you can’t ignore, if it’s produced together then both you as provider or whatever and the service user make the decisions together. Co-production is being defined as meaning equal voices in whatever arena you’re talking about whether it’s a social care or health arena. Participation before, you felt that you were taking an active part, but I’ve participated for a number of years now and in some of these arenas I felt I’ve been hitting my head against a brick wall. Whereas now I think with this emphasis, certainly in SCIE, you feel that your voice is being heard. Co-production I think includes participation and takes it further. So it’s not just consulting people at an early stage of development of a project, for example, co-production is about involving everybody concerned from the start to the finish. The very first stage is you sit down with the people who have a – you know who are stakeholders in that particular area and develop the whole project together from that point rather than coming in at a later stage and saying ‘well we’re running this project, now we’d like you to participate in it.’ Participation is really about consultation and people taking part, whereas co-production is doing things together in an equal partnership so there’s a big difference and it’s a big shift, and I think co-production in its truest sense is something to aspire to, to sort of work towards because it is very hard to achieve, but it is possible. I think services, social care services, would be vastly improved if they were all co-produced.