West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership are developing a set of Inclusive Co-design Principles and want you to have the chance to contribute to them.

Across the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnerships we are working together to develop a set of Inclusive Co-design Principles which will be used to help ensure service innovation and improvements are always designed with the people who they are for.

Colleagues working or volunteering within the WY Partnership are being asked to contribute to the development of the Inclusive Co-design principles via a short survey which will ask you about:

● What Inclusive Co-design means to you
● Enablers and barriers to Inclusive Co-design
● Examples of good practice, tools or guides
● Related work happening in West Yorkshire
● Embedding this across all innovation and improvement work

The survey will run until 19:00 on Tuesday 19 April.

What is Co-design?

Co-design is an approach for creating new (or improving existing) products, services, care pathways etc., by working in a collaborative way with people impacted. People with living and learned experience are involved in the design process and in decision making. You might have also heard of similar approaches like Co-production, Co-creation, User Centred Design or Human Centred Designor you might use different words in your organisation. These are all different methods of working to ensure that people’s experiences are at the centre of innovation and improvement work.

In this work, we will aim to go a step further and develop shared language and definitions of what ‘Inclusive Co-design’ is, what it looks like when it is done well and provide tools that can support people to work inclusively and design for everybody, rather than the majority.


Why this is important

The development of Inclusive Co-design Principles for the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership to have as a reference point for best practice came about through the Inclusion, Innovation and Improvement Board which is chaired by the partnerships’ Chief Executive Officer, Rob Webster. The importance of Co-design and inclusion of seldom heard voices and marginalised communities in service design and improvment is widely recognised in reducing inequalities and improving health outcomes. In short, it makes things better and it makes things stick.


Who should complete the survey

The survey is open to colleagues working across the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, whether you are in the NHS, social care, local government, voluntary and community sector organisations, or private sector partners delivering services on behalf of the NHS.


How we are engaging the local population

‘Listening Exercises’ will be facilitated with a variety of community groups from across the Integrated Care System, this will include marginalised and seldom heard groups. Voluntary and Community Sector organisations within West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership will be asked to support this engagement.

If you are interested in being involved in this engagement work, please contact the team at [email protected].


Next steps

In April, we will be engaging with the workforce (through this survey) and the local population (through listening exercises).

In May and June, we will then review what we have found and work with organisations across West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership to co-design the principles and test them out.

If you are interested in being involved in any of the above work, please contact [email protected] and keep an eye out for updates on socials.

Programme areas within the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership have previously developed involvement principles & principles for how we work together.

You can complete the survey here and for more information please contact [email protected].

*Thrive by Design is an NHS Design Studio hosted by Leeds and York Partnership NHSFoundation Trust. You can find out more about the team and their work here.