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
- Co-production in Mental Health: a literature review. New Economics Foundation 2013. Mind commissioned the New Economics Foundation to carry out a review of existing evidence regarding co-production. It examines when, why, and how co-production has been used in mental health and what impact it has had on people’s lives and their recovery.
- Co-production in mental health commissioning. Rethink Mental Illness has a range of resources and tools based on their programme and Mental Health in Co-production evaluation Project (MiC).
- NSUN: Healthy Lives Project. The Healthy Lives Project report summarises physical healthcare experiences of people with serious mental illness diagnoses and makes recommendations for change.
- Practical Guide: Progressing transformative co-production in mental health. The National Development Team for Inclusion have developed a suite of resources for transformative co-production, aimed at different audiences, including the practical guide linked here.
- 4Pi National Involvement Standards. Developed and produced by people with lived experience, NSUN established some basic principles to encourage people to think of involvement in terms of principles, purpose, presence, process and impact (4Pi).
Tagged: serious mental illness (SMI), stolen years