Any evidenced examples of better value from co-productive approaches?

[John Gillespie]

Particularly interested in whether anyone has looked at savings from co-production as well as better outcomes?

[Julia]

We tend to see savings over the medium to long term, once an organisation has transitioned to a co-pro model. Two really good examples (which have evidence galore) are Local Area Co-ordination (LAC) in Australia and Family Nurse Partnerships in the U.S. The evidence for Family Nurse Partnerships (www.nursefamilypartnership.org) is more linked to the preventative effects of co-production within that particular model, but is still quite pursuasive.

I think RETAIN, Richmond Fellowships, also have evidence on cost savings made through co-producing. Will have a look and try to upload them into the document library.

[Elke Loeffler]

Hi John,

Excellent question - we clearly need more thorough business cases for co-production.

Just to add to Julia’s examples: evaluations of the UK Expert Patients Programme for patients with chronic conditions (probably the most famous example of co-production in the UK) found that it produced better patient outcomes, at lower cost. The patients involved benefited from the equivalent of one extra week of perfect health per year and there was a reduced cost of around £27 per patient (small but it amounted to £m in total).

Other peer-based co-production approaches such as Recovery Innovations in Arizona (on our website www.govint.org) also show that with every fall in hospitalizations comes a big cash saving - a 15% drop in hospitalisations over 15 months represents a saving of roughly $10 million. Of course, the issue here is that prevention costs money in the short-term but the savings can only be expected in the long-run and are often hard to quantify. Moreover, the ‘savings’ might be experienced by another organization - for example, investment in housing quality may lead to savings in health and care services, which are not of benefit to the housing organisations making the original investment.

Another case study on our website is the Swedish hospital of Eskjö near Jönköping – their move to co-production saving them investing in a major extension to the gastro-enterology ward (8 years later, still no need to extend the ward). This is a major investment saving, although they didn’t put a monetary value on it.

There is also evidence that individual budgets result in savings for public agencies and better quality of life for the people concerned. I recently experienced the evidence from two young people with disabilities who had shifted to personal budgets in the London Borough of Lambeth: they are no longer depressed ‘cases’ sitting at home being cared for but have become self-confident employers of chosen carers and active members of their community. I would recommend to you checking the recent Demos publication “Making it personal” for hard figures on savings from moving to individual budgets.

I think it is also important to calculate the costs where co-production is lacking or has broken down. For example, most parents co-produce their children’s futures by sending their child to school on time etc. However, a small number of parents do not co-produce their children’s futures. This pathology of lack of co-production is incredibly costly to the state if it is not dealt with, as the evidence from the recent Total Place pilots indicates.

Best wishes

Elke

[Hannah Dobbin]

Hi, slightly delayed response but I'm also interested in this, in particular looking at evidence of improved outcomes for children and young people as a result of co-production. Does anyone have any ideas please?

[Joe Penny]

Hi John,

 

following from Julia's reply, have a look at the resources we have put up here

 

http://coproductionnetwork.com/page/measurement-and-evaluation

 

we will be adding more evidence and value related reports in the coming days and weeks, so do check back

 

joe