Co production strategies

Patients and NHS staff in Lancashire are sitting down together to redesign how mental health services are planned and delivered. This project, called Co-production Strategies, tackles a persistent gap in healthcare: services are often designed by professionals alone, without meaningful input from the people who actually use them. The result can be care that feels irrelevant, inaccessible, or even alienating to patients. The researchers are testing and evaluating practical methods for bringing service users and clinicians into genuine partnership—not just token consultation, but shared decision-making on everything from appointment scheduling to treatment pathways. If the approach works, it could change how NHS trusts across the country develop services, making them more responsive to real patient needs. The immediate impact is on mental health care in Lancashire and South Cumbria, but the evaluation is designed to produce transferable lessons. This is applied health services research with a direct practical aim: better patient outcomes through better service design. There is no fundamental science here—the value is in showing what co-production looks like in practice and whether it actually improves care.