National Care Service - governance and representation: co-design report

Co-design sessions

We ran co-design sessions with a group of 12 people with lived experience of accessing services or providing or managing services. Having group members with different experiences allowed us to discuss different ideas and work on co-design aims together.

By meeting with the same group for a series of sessions, we could:

• spend more time helping participants to take part
• build on discussions from session to session. Participants got to know each other and felt more comfortable discussing ideas together
• give participants time to develop their own knowledge of the topics, so that we could have more in-depth discussions.

We held 7 half-day sessions with the group. Each session focused on a different topic. Topics included:

• how people would join the board and work together, where we talked about ways of working, rights and safeguarding
• board membership
• wider representation and structures
• recruitment, knowledge and skills of board members
• knowledge and skills of the chair and how to include lived experience
• working with integration authority (IA) representation
• training needs