1: The challenges and necessity of co-production
Introduction to Volume 1
The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered people’s lives. While pandemics have of course occurred before, for modern times COVID-19 has been unusually destructive and inhibitory in scale. However, what this pandemic shares with previous ones is having a disproportionately detrimental impact on people who were already disadvantaged by structural inequalities before the pandemic began (Bambra et al, 2020; Marmot et al, 2020). The virus has been particularly pervasive and destructive in its impact on Black, Asian, and minoritised ethnic groups; people of lower socioeconomic status; people in undervalued employment; people living in deprived areas, poor housing, and/or overcrowded accommodation; older people; disabled people; people with learning difficulties; people with psycho-social disabilities; and people with long term conditions – especially those who rely on social care. This has caused us to reflect on the relative strengths and weaknesses of approaches typically taken in modern politics and public policy in general, and health and social care specifically, as well as to consider alternatives that could better serve us in the future. For us, key among these alternative approaches is co-production.
Predictably, those most severely affected by COVID-19 are the people and groups who are now largely being ignored in developing responses to the pandemic and consequently are further detrimentally impacted by it – in many cases fatally. Co-production offers an alternative. It is consistent with efforts to challenge the exclusionary nature of much ideology underpinning health and social care policy and practice and to move to more inclusive and participatory approaches (Beresford, 2021).
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