‘Co-production’ in the design and delivery of mental healthcare was the central theme at an evening event held in June at london’s Dragon Café in Borough, reports DIMHN President, Joe Forster, who attended.
He explained: “Professor of Democratic Mental Health, Mick McKeown, and his colleague, Professor Karen Wright, from the University of Central lancashire (where DIMHN has its early roots), explained that ‘co-production’ is the vision behind their new book, Essentials of Mental Health Nursing, newly published in print and online by Sage. This innovative textbook involved student nurses and service-users among its authors and production team. The chapter on environments was written by me with two service-users – Dr Rob MacDonald and Ian Callaghan, and student nurse, Sarah loughran. The book features both DIMHN and Mental Fight Club, which runs the Dragon Café, and whose late founder, Sarah Wheeler, presented at a past DIMH conference, as exemplars of coproduction. Alongside speeches from myself and Mick McKeown, Sarah loughran presented the Dragon Café’s Declan McGill – who is also Mental Fight Club’s communications manager – with a copy of the book and a certificate.
“Sarah loughran, now a staff nurse with Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, explained that while our chapter is just one of over 40 in this extensive book, it provides a fifth of the entries for ‘co-production’ in the index. Dragon Café patrons joined in with a spirited and wide-ranging debate on how policy and practice have affected their own and others’ experiences of mental healthcare. Artist Katharine lazenby, congratulated for winning the Spring/Summer 2018 Dentons Art Prize just days before, then presented a compelling account of her own experiences of mental healthcare and the ways that environments – good and bad – had contributed. She then described how she now uses co-production, with charity, Hospital Rooms, to create, commission, and curate, museum-quality art ‘to disrupt and lift the barriers to those environments’, which she said should be ‘places where people feel valued, involved, and optimistic’.”
Pictured with Joe Forster (far left), left to right, are Katharine lazenby, Mick McKeown, Sarah loughran, and Declan McGill.