Facilitating co-production in public services: Empirical evidence from a co-design experience with family caregivers living in a remote and rural area

Abstract

The involvement of vulnerable actors in co-production activities is a debated topic in the current public service literature. While vulnerable actors should have the same opportunities to be involved as other actors, they may not have the needed competences, skills and attitudes to contribute to this process. This paper is part of a broader project on family caregivers’ engagement in remote and rural areas. In particular, it investigates how to facilitate co-production by looking at four co-design workshops with family caregivers, representatives of a local home care agency and researchers. The transcripts of the workshops were coded using NVivo, and the data were analysed based on the existing theory about co-production. Two main findings were identified from the analysis. First, the adoption of co-production by vulnerable actors may occur in conjunction with other forms of engagement. Second, the interactions among facilitators and providers play a crucial role in encouraging the adoption of co-production. We identified at least two strategies that may help facilitators and providers achieve that goal. However, there is a need for an in-depth understanding of how facilitators and providers should interact to enhance implementation of co-production.

S.O.S. Caregivers: a multi-method participatory study to co-design, piloting, and transferring a novel psycho-social service for engaging family caregivers in remote rural settings.

“…The workshops were conducted by two expert moderators (NM, EG), employing a non-directive style to enhance spontaneous participation. Further information can be found in a previously published paper (31) which describes this phase of the research in greater depth.…”

“…At the same time, internal and informal meetings and activities were organised by smaller groups of team members. At the end of the pilot, service outcomes were assessed using both quantitative and qualitative methods; further information about these assessments can be found in a previously published paper (31), which describes the metrics and assessment results in greater depth.…”

“…The role of caregivers For more information about the qualitative and quantitative analyses of the service pilot, see (31).…”

Co-destruction in social care services: how to identify and evaluate barriers arising from a co- production exercise with family carers living in rural and remote areas

“…This research is part of a larger study intended to make a substantial contribution to the debate on the involvement of vulnerable citizens in co-production activities [55]. This research was performed in the latest phase of the study, in which we considered the transferability of the project to similar remote and rural areas.…”

Empowering or addicting? An analysis of the effects of team members–supervisor relationships on job satisfaction in healthcare

“…Even though there is limited agreement on its definition (Michie et al, 2003), patient centredness can be conceived of as an innovative healthcare delivery model which is established on the understanding of patients and health professionals as persons (Palumbo, 2021), rather than as sheer users and providers (Ciasullo et al, 2017a). Both are involved in a co-creating relationship (Gheduzzi et al, 2021) which encourages them to share power and responsibilities in shaping health promotion and risk prevention services according to the bio-psycho-social model of care (Mead and Bower, 2000). Nevertheless, several barriers prevent the nimble accomplishment of a fully fledged patient-centred approach to care (Bodega ˚rd et al, 2019;Schiavone et al, 2020) Increased coordination in the design and delivery of health services and interprofessional collaboration have been argued to be underpinning factors of patientcentredness (Langberg et al, 2019).…”