Co-creating an evaluation framework with UCL Centre for Co-production in Health Research
The UCL Centre for Co-production in Health Research exists to support health professionals, researchers and patients to unlock new ways to address long-standing health issues. Here Just Ideas’ Associate Leila Baker describes a recent blog by Centre co-creator Lizzie Cain summarises what the Centre has learned and gained from Just Ideas’ support.
More and more health professionals, researchers and patients are interested in working together to unlock new ways to address long-standing health issues. The UCL Centre for Co-production in Health Research exists to support them. The Centre has been co-created from the start in 2018 by the people it supports. And how it approaches evaluation is no exception.
Just Ideas worked with 50 people involved with the Centre over several workshops, meetings and conversations to co-create an evaluation framework that would help them reflect on their progress during the early days of the Centre’s development. Lizzie Cain, a Centre co-creator, summarises what the Centre learned and gained from Just Ideas’ support in a blog for the Centre.
Her blog explains that Just Ideas quickly advised the Centre to move away from evaluation jargon and instead to ask questions that everyone could relate to like ‘What would success look like for the Centre?’ By working with all 50 co-creators and asking this and other similarly open questions we supported them to arrive at five success factors for the Centre as well as some ways to measure progress against them. And while a lot of our time was spent working with people to evaluate the Centre as a whole, we also worked with smaller groups of people who were co-producing research often for the first time. The simple self-evaluation process we developed with these groups led to early learning and reflections for the Centre about the challenges and potential of co-production. Lizzie closes her blog with her own responses to the work of Just Ideas.
