Co-production is based on the principle that people who use services have valuable knowledge and expertise.

Co-production means developing equal and reciprocal relationships between professionals, people using services, and communities to produce knowledge and services that are potentially more effective overall.

The Centre for Co-production encourages interdisciplinary co-productive academic research, teaching, practice and radical mental health scholarship within and outside the Department of Mental Health, Social Work and Integrative Science in the School of Health and Education at Middlesex University.

The Centre consolidates, supports and expands the existing activity and expertise in co-production within the Department. It provides a hub for innovative and radical scholarship that is co-produced between service users, their organisations and communities, carers and staff and the infrastructure for expanding co-production activity in mental health and social care.

Recognising Expertise: If you want to know about an issue ask the people it affects and who understand it! In care environments, people are participating in service delivery and shaping improvements more effectively to meet the end users’ needs

Building Learning Communities: Co-production can build confidence in individuals, empower groups and strengthen communities. This way of working can build social capital and remedy some of the issues caused by having people who are removed from an issue attempting to fix it.

When people’s diverse lived experience, expertise, time, skills, and resources are engaged it increases all our capacity to solve issues Co-production has an ethical purpose as well as a practical one – it raises our expectations around working together by moving from model of ‘participation’ to one of co-creation by gathering a range of people with different perspectives to work together contributing different and essential knowledge to for solutions which meet the needs of the those affected.