Authentic PPIE – the (re)search for authentic engagement

I count myself fortunate to have friends and colleagues who both support me in my work and help me learn new things 🙂

One of these lovely people is Kate Henaghan-Sykes, Public Partnerships Manager at the Primary Care Research Centre in Southampton. I initially shared the thoughts in my previous post with Kate and other colleagues, and she wrote back with with some reflections, which she has kindly allowed me to share with you 🙂

Hi Sharon,

Thanks so much for following this up. I completely agree about intention – it’s often it’s often the difference between tokenism and genuine collaboration.    Intention is the driving force.

My reflections are…

There is no clearly (widely agreed across disciplines) defined framework for co-production,  leaving it open to interpretation.  For some people, co‑production is understood as researchers and people with lived experience working together at every stage:

Relationship building →  Funding application → Planning → Design → Delivery → Shared power throughout.

But in many projects, often because of funding structures, ethics processes and institutional requirements, co‑production ends up looking more like:

Relationship‑building → Delivery → Design and planning → (limited) power‑sharing.

So the intention to involve people meaningfully can be very strong, but early involvement gets squeezed.  That often leads to a big gap between what researchers intend and what the wider public perceives as “co‑production.”

That’s why language matters. Ultimately, beyond the community,  when publications are written, they need to reflect both the integrity of the intention and the structural constraints. When the term doesn’t match what was actually possible, it leaves researchers open to criticism, even when their intentions were good.  

So helping researchers to describe what actually happened is important.  Making use of other words like co-design and co-creation, can offer more transparency.    Stepping out of the prescriptive co-production tick list,  exploring where power can be shared and what can be influenced  leads to better shared practice and more accurate reporting. 

 This review is excellent  O’Mara-Eves et al. 2022 The Value of Co-Production rapid critical review.pdf

“From our review, it appears that current academic systems and culture do not create a good environment for most co-production research projects to reach their potential and need to adapt to be inclusive of co-production. The long list of meaningful values underpinning co-production suggest that it is worth trying to get right. Even more than that, co-production can be seen as a complex intervention in its own right, with intended and unintended impacts beyond that of the focus of the research project, and with impacts occurring along the process, not just in the end product. The principles of co-production need to be properly aligned with the design and implementation of the project, with a co-produced evaluation plan and collaborative authorship, to fully assess the total impacts of the co-produced research.”

Best Wishes,

Kate