Abstract
AbstractThe involvement of citizens in the production and creation of public services has become a central tenet for administrations internationally. In Scotland, co-production has underpinned the integration of health and social care via the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014. We report on a qualitative study that examined the experiences and perspectives of local and national leaders in Scotland on undertaking and sustaining co-production in public services. By adopting a meso and macro perspective, we interviewed senior planning officers from eight health and social care partnership areas in Scotland and key actors in national agencies. The findings suggest that an overly complex Scottish governance landscape undermines the sustainability of co-production efforts. As part of a COVID-19 recovery, both the implementation of meaningful co-production and coordinated leadership for health and social care in Scotland need to be addressed, as should the development of evaluation capacities of those working across health and social care boundaries so that co-production can be evaluated and report to inform the future of the integration agenda.
Highlights
How do leaders of health and social care integration understand and seek to operationalise co-production? This article examines how co-production is interpreted by health and social care leaders in Scotland
Co-production is often interpreted as a ‘woolly-word’ in public policy (Osborne et al, ) and vacuous policy signaling can undermine the potential for co-production to happen (Needham and Carr, ; Slay and Stephens, ; Flinders et al, ; Oliver et al, ). It is the lived experience of such a ‘woolly-word’ that this article seeks to examine i.e. lived by those whose task it is to promote and deliver co-production. Respondents discussed their experiences of co-production in terms of examples from their health and social care partnership area, but they talked about co-production from a normative perspective and how this applied to the nature of their work
Health and social care leaders accounted for their distance from everyday interactions with citizens, and this included framing their joint working with other professionals within their employer, or the partnership, as co-production
Summary
How do leaders of health and social care integration understand and seek to operationalise co-production? This article examines how co-production is interpreted by health and social care leaders in Scotland. The macro-level interviews secured national public sector organisations which have a leadership role in health and social care governance in Scotland, plus one major third sector advocacy body.
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