Hard to reach, or struggling to be heard? Real‐life experience of coproduction with people with learning disabilities.

Background: Coproduction is a fast‐developing approach to patient involvement. It entails health and social care services users working as equals in partnership with providers and other public institutions to produce novel research and information, usually aimed at the improvement of service planning and delivery. Methods: This paper presents two real‐life examples of attempted coproduction with a group of men with learning disabilities in England. The first case study concerns the piloting and assessment of a 'user‐friendly' version of a local authority's 'vision statement'. The second explores an attempt to secure funding to develop and evaluate a community intervention with and for people with learning disabilities. Findings: Together, these portraits capture two important and intertwined problems that afflict the field of coproduction: namely, the drive to create fast results and the challenges of time and resource allocation that service users and professionals face whenever they attempt to coproduce work in a meaningful way. Conclusions: The paper concludes with some suggestions for how policy and practice might seek to address these issues in the future. Accessible summary: Nowadays, people with learning disabilities are starting to work together with health professionals and people in universities. This is called service user involvement.In this article, we talk about a special kind of involvement: it is called coproduction, and it means that service users and professionals should work together as equal teammates.People with learning disabilities can tell professionals what services they need and how they should be cared for. They can help to create user‐friendly policies and publications. They can also make their own choices about what research should be done and how to go about it.Here, we talk about two coproduction projects which involved a community group for men with learning disabilities.We show how these two projects excluded the men and put some of them off the idea of coproduction.At the end, we give some ideas on how we might make coproduction work better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]