This report brings together our practical learning and evidence on using co-design and co-delivery to create a health system driven by the people within it.

Key Findings

• Care planning, pathway planning and wellbeing planning enable patients to identify their own goals and aspirations, and to navigate the services that will help to achieve them.
• The challenge is to harness collaborative working culture and spread and embed it in new settings, including it as standard in primary care and acute services and in service governance.
• Prototyping is an approach to developing and testing ideas at an early stage before large-scale resources are committed to implementation. It is a quick way to evaluate and validate impact and manage risk.
• It is much easier to design a service than design a system. But designing a radically different service often requires redesigning the system - to provide the spaces, opportunities, capabilities and support for new services to be possible.

At the core of a People Powered Health approach is collective ownership of health and wellbeing. Professionals need to start from the position of not necessarily knowing the right answer, which is a significant challenge.

Creating a health system driven by the people within it, not by the institutions that provide care, requires engagement in all stages - in designing, delivering or using, and in evaluating the service. This recognises that those who provide and experience services should have an equal say and role in how services are designed and delivered.

This requires going beyond 'engagement', 'involvement' and 'person-centred' towards real co-design and co-delivery at every level of the health service. There are many definitions, and many facets, of co-design and co-delivery. What all of them have in common is an ethos and recognition that those who provide and experience services should have an equal say and role in how such services are designed and delivered.

By us, For us: the power of co-design and co-delivery is one in a series of learning products which explain why People Powered Health works, what it looks like and the key features needed to replicate success elsewhere.

Authors
Martha Hampson, with Peter Baeck and Katharine Langford. Series Editor, Julie Temperley

This video outlines the principles of co-design and co-delivery in the context of improving our healthcare systems: