The Collaborative is co-designing a new commissioning model to enable the delivery of co-productive services, with a focus on building capacity in primary care to prevent the move to secondary care. It addresses a variety of issues facing commissioners ranging from how to better connect with communities so you can identify opportunities and challenges within them, to how to better assess outcomes, and encourage providers to work differently and more collaboratively.

The Collaborative is working to the 6 principles of co-production as defined by NESTA and The New Economics Foundation (NEF):

1. Building on people’s existing capabilities: altering the delivery model of public services from a deficit approach to one that provides opportunities to recognise and grow people’s capabilities and actively support them to put them to use at an individual and community level.
2. Reciprocity and mutuality: offering people a range of incentives to engage which enable us to work in reciprocal relationships with professionals and with each other, where there are mutual responsibilities and expectations.
3. Peer support networks: engaging peer and personal networks alongside professionals as the best way of transferring knowledge.
4. Blurring distinctions: removing the distinction between professionals and recipients, and between producers and consumers of services, by reconfiguring the way services are developed and delivered.
5. Facilitating rather than delivering: enabling public service agencies to become catalysts and facilitators rather than central providers themselves.
6. Assets: transforming the perception of people from passive recipients of services and burdens on the system into one where they are equal partners in designing and delivering services.

For more information on Co-Production we recommend a read of www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/Co–production-report.pdf