The Neurodevelopmental Disorders Annual Seminar was held in Edinburgh this year. During the event, we held a workshop called Overcoming barriers to co-production with children and adults with neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Many researchers feel unprepared to co-produce research with people with neurodevelopmental disabilities, while still believing in the value of co-production. This workshop aimed to address this gap, by giving researchers an overview of the main challenges to co-production and how to overcome them.
We had three excellent speakers:
Dr Laura Crane, co-director of Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE) at University College London. In her talk, she explained her journey into participatory research methods, how research about autistic people has changed in the last few years, challenges and solutions to co-production work.
You can see her presentation on our YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMSrhVBn4sk&t=27s
Next, we had Sarah O’Brien, a PhD researcher at Kings College London. She talked about co-production from the perspective of conducting it as a facilitator but also being involved as an autistic and dyspraxic individual. She talks about what she learnt along the way.
See her talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaBizLjR0rI&t=346s
Finally, we had Emma Pauley, who is a parent and co-production advocate. She talked about being involved in genuine co-production and then, tokenistic co-production. She spoke about how it was easy for her to see the difference and how they made her feel.
In the afternoon of the workshop, attendees (45 researchers in the area of neurodevelopmental conditions) discussed challenges and solutions to co-production across six themes: 1) Recruitment and Partnership building, 2) Payment, Expectations, and Trust, 3) Facilitation of co-production with adults, 4) Facilitation of co-production with children and adolescents, 5) Evaluation or 6) Dissemination and public engagement.
Over July and August we will be posting two blog series summarising the outputs from this workshop: starting this week with the: ‘Insights from Researchers on Co-production blog series. and then, later in the summer Emma Pauley’s series ‘Insights from a Lived experience on Co-production blog series’
This workshop was funded by the University of Edinburgh College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine Public Engagement Seed Fund through the Institutional Strategic Support Fund.
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