On 15 February 2024 we held our final co-creation workshop, thereby bringing an end to a journey which began around 18 months ago.
To warm up, the participants were asked to note down words to describe what it meant for them to take part in the PREMSTEM project through co-creation activities. The words they came up with to describe the experience were: fun, involvement, interesting, insights, empowering, learning, technical, communication, strategy, eye-opening, listening, chance and honour. One participant observed that through co-creation, PREMSTEM has empowered parents to use their voice and given different stakeholders a role to play.
In the first individual exercise, the participants reviewed the roadmap created over the last three sessions. The group was happy to have an outcome based on real insights from interviews with parents and not only based on gut feelings.
The rest of the session was dedicated to tackling two other issues which were raised during interviews with parents which took place last year. First of all, they brainstormed how to provide clear information in plain language to parents, guided by the facilitator’s questions: ‘What if you can’t talk to the parent?’ and “How might we be sure that parents really understand the information about the clinical trial?’. After grouping the different ideas by theme, the participants chose and developed their favourite idea together, an app.
The second issue they tackled was how to facilitate parent to parent interactions, guided by the facilitator’s question: ‘How would Google solve this problem?’ – e.g. what kinds of tools could be used to help connect parents.
This exercise brought us the end to the final workshop in what has been an eye opening and collaborative journey with our stakeholders. In total 42 different people have taken part in our co-creation activities (workshops and interviews). Many of them have attended multiple sessions and shown a great dedication to the process, for which we are extremely grateful.
This has been a big part of our lives for 18 months.
Co-creation participant
A big thank you to everyone who joined us on this journey, including our facilitator Enrique Conches from Punk Design who has guided us through every session and the whole process.
As a next step, the RMIT Europe team will submit a report to the European Commission about the co-creation activities we have run, what we have learned and the outcomes of the process. Once approved, this report will be made available on this website.
