Co-production with Children’s Community Health Services

We recently invited various partners from Manchester’s Education, Health and Care services to reflect and share with us how co-production has helped them deliver SEND (Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities) provision to our families.

Below is a message from Laila Baig (Head of Service Children and Young People’s Occupational Therapy), Maria Oakley (Lead Manager for Children’s Community Health Services) and Michael Hargreaves (Transformation Programme Manager), who share with us some wonderful insight on our co-production work with their respective teams.

Working together with families and carers to co-produce services has arguably never been so important and Co-production Week gives the opportunity to share and celebrate some of the recent and current examples of what we have achieved by working in partnership.

Recognising the vital importance of working in partnership to develop our services, the Children’s Community Health Services (part of the Manchester Local Care Organisation) held a stakeholder conference in April 2019, attended by professionals across Health and Education as well as parents and carers and from this event developed priorities for the children’s community health service and partners.

Since then, we have:

• Worked with representatives from the Manchester Parent Carer Forum and Manchester City Council to develop “About Me” and “More About Me” profiles for children and young people with additional needs. Once in place, the About Me and More About Me will provide valuable information to enable settings to tailor their approach for different individuals, leading to a better, more effective experience for children and young people.
• Begun to develop integrated pathways of support for children and young people. We are working alongside education colleagues to develop jointly delivered pathways of support for those children, young people and families facing increased difficulties as a result of the pandemic and changes in school arrangements.

Good news from previous co-production:

• The pilot to develop the Social Communication Pathway in the south of the city has improved the experience and wait time for children and young people undergoing assessment for autism. The pathway has now been approved for roll out city-wide which is brilliant news.

These developments are not and would not be possible without the collaboration with and shared aims of the Manchester Parent Carer Forum. We’re starting to see some amazing changes for services in Manchester and the partnership with parents and carers is absolutely central to this.

We’re looking forward to continuing the partnership and the positive changes that result.