Table 3 Paradigmatic implications of research co-production
Processes | Impacts |
|---|---|
1. Emergence of new ideas, methods and relationships | • Proliferation of new ideas • Knowledge greater than the sum of its parts • Recognition and shift towards new research methods to facilitate co-production/integrated knowledge translation • Greater appreciation of blending techniques within academic institutions • Stronger links and understanding developed between multiple practice and academic disciplines • More diverse, enduring and representative engagement in the processes and outcomes of research, e.g. practitioners and service users being named on or leading further research proposals • Co-design of questions and co-analysis of data aided the transferability and validity of results • Practitioners and patients explicitly recognised for participating in research and contributing to the development of its outputs |
2. Transformative synergies as a result of complex sequences of interventions and interactions | • Questions the nature of knowledge • Acknowledges, harnesses and perpetuates the democratisation of knowledge • Challenges the hegemony of reductionist approaches to healthcare research • Enables research that is dynamic, agile and responsive to local contexts and changing circumstances • Embraces complexity, dissonance and uncertainty • Creates rich contextualised evidence from various sources to foster stakeholders’ contextual adroitness and furnish their mindlines with other perspectives • Harnesses the creativity, expertise, experience and energy of people who provide and use services – this can be politically and practically productive • Permits redesign and regulation of services to reflect the needs of people who use and work within them • Places human contextual and emotive issues within research; engages with research users’, generators’ and policy-makers’ emotive and rational selves • Facilitates an ideological shift towards justice and equality rather than hierarchy and power imbalance in the process and outcomes of research • We also discerned the potential for co-production to create a virtuous cycle; a recurring cycle of events, in which learning, innovation and improvement are embedded and continuous, and each cycle increases the benefit of the ones before |