Co-production: involvement and influence

This page offers ideas and tools to help you involve people who have experience of mental illness in co-producing improvements to physical health services and supporting materials. 


Involving people with serious mental ill health and their family and carers in the design and commissioning of physical healthcare provision empowers individuals. Their involvement can help develop relevant and useful resources, and improve service access and associated health outcomes. This can mean a change in service culture and can have pronounced benefits for both service users and staff.

Suggested solutions

Support routine involvement of service users and carers, ideally through a co-production approach, in:

  • Developing, delivering and evaluating a strategy with  planned initiatives to address the serious mental illness (SMI) mortality gap.
  • Service specifications, delivery and evaluations.
  • Identifying processes, outcomes and user-led measures that are meaningful to service users to evaluate services. For example, taking into account increased confidence and social contacts, as well as measures of physical health indicators, such as weight or glucose control.
  • Training and education, user-led training, development of physical health self-management tools, information packs, clinic invitations or clinical environment design

Tools to help you

Previous | Next

Tagged: ,

« Back to Involving service users