Learning Together for Better Health Outcomes

April 2, 2014    

OCP Ltd working in with Involve and the Professional Support Unit (PSU) part of Shared Services and Health Education England has come together as partners to develop a programme of work around improving health and engagement practices.  The work has a particular focus on developing the role and voice of service users (includes patients, public, cares and other community-based groups). Public and patient involvement has a considerable history in the UK and beyond. OCP Ltd interest and role is in both capturing both the learning and engaging project participants in evaluating what change has happened as a result of such project. For Involve the project marks an interesting exploration of the role of co-production in changing professional education, research, and services and also in highlighting the importance of arts based approaches in participation. For PSU, the interest is in developing more creative approaches to improving communication and use of information through dialogue between professionals, service user communities and organisations to achieve better health outcomes, that will be more meaningful and matter more to service users.

This joint project is targeted at professionals and teams working in health related organisations and projects (including their patients, carers, and service users) to address health issues. This project is about helping people work together to improve the quality of communication and information that is co-produced through creative dialogue driven approaches to learning, for changing health provision, policy, research and, or  professional practices, delivered through a series of short and long participatory workshops.

Co-productive learning has been a growing field of practice over the last few years. As an ‘asset-based approach’ it works on the assumption that we all bring a set of valuable experiences, expertise and skills which can be developed and built upon to help improve our own health, and the health of others. Such learning recognises all forms of expertise, but the process of creating meaningful dialogue between people with these different types of expertise can be challenging, as issues of power relationships need to be recognised. This is also given attention in enabling change to happen.

Our project which is about Learning Together for Achieving Better Health Outcomes through Dialogue will use workshop sessions to explore and demonstrate innovative ways of co-producing learning together. It will draw on theory and practices from applied theatre, community development and adult education to make it easy and fun, in ways that you can start to make changes sooner, and not just later.

Involve’s  role will be to lead on the development of an online resource based on these workshops working with its other partners together with workshop participants and wider network members, who will also offer and provide substantive input. The resource will contain:

• Stories of working together: challenging each other to improve experiences and outcomes
• Information on:
  • Arts based approaches to creating dialogue, including applied theatre techniques
  • Group facilitation techniques
  • Participative enquiry and evaluation
  • Adult learning, community development and co-production models

If you are interested in finding out more about this project, its aims, and workshops please contact    hament@ocp-ltd.com .