Table 2 Practical suggestions for co-production.

Be well-resourced and include adequate and well-considered remuneration in your funding plan, and check this through PPI feedback. Consider vouchers, refreshments, lunch, travel reimbursements, and child-friendly tokens of appreciation.

£20 love-to-shop vouchers, travel reimbursements in line with LYPFT’s mileage coverage, hot drinks, lunch, and goodie bags for children.

Allow for flexibility, especially when involving children and/or people with additional needs. This may require extra staffing and other resources.

Extra staffing, flexible but pre-planned activities, researchers equipped with lists of questions organised by priority.

Plan to change plans—build time within schedule and allow as much room as your funding remit will allow.

Workshops structured with extra time and back-up activities available.

Build in more meeting opportunities so that everyone can be involved, even if they need to skip a group meeting.

Built in ‘catch up calls’ to the project plan, usually with multiple co-producers so that full conversations could be had regarding missed workshop content.

Learn to become comfortable with flexibility and prioritise critical outcomes over ideal outcomes from each meeting with co-producers. Be reflexive in your practice.

Researchers are aware of key questions and critical outcomes as well as ideal points that could be missed. Co-producers advised to contact researchers with any additional points outside workshops.

Build a strengths-focused environment that uses positive language and builds confidence.

Shared ADHD Superhero booklet (Powell et al., 2021) before workshops. All study-related information and documents used strengths-focused language. Children were encouraged to participate in whatever way they were comfortable with.

Use a gentle rewards system with children to tangibly show that you’re listening to them and respecting the ways they may prefer to participate.

Sticker chart which rewarded ‘helpful’ behaviour. Verbal praise for participating in whatever way made them comfortable.

Use a visual note taker to live-scribe meetings/workshops and explicitly allow co-producers to add to these. Visual notes are more accessible and easier to digest.

Experienced live-scriber/graphic artist was costed into the study and attended most discovery and co-production workshops.

When working with neurodiverse children, traditional workshop methods may not be preferred. Use covert play-based approaches to gather your information

To find out what kinds of activities the children preferred, multiple activities were made available during ‘breaks.’ Researchers observed these interactions and asked questions as the children played.

Use qualitative research skills and/or include a qualitative researcher to support your interpretations of meetings and conversations with co-producers and to translate them into something tangible.

We used a graphic designer to support in taking live notes to minimise interpretation afterwards; we used the qualitative research skills within the academic team (e.g. content analysis) to pull out key themes to take forward

Consider how to involve co-producers at every stage of production including the physical creation of a product, i.e. using craft materials to develop the product as opposed to just talking about it. Using creative methods to produce sections of a product that can be shown more frequently throughout the process or creating the final designs as a group.

Ideas for format and content came from co-producers in this study, but participants were not directly involved in the physical production of the nature activity boxes. We could have spent more time using craft materials, paper and pens, or computers with participants to make the final intervention box together.