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RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

A personal reflection on co-creation in public health: a dream partly realised

Adrian Bauman A *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Prevention Research Collaboration, Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

* Correspondence to: adrian.bauman@sydney.edu.au

Public Health Research and Practice 32, e3222210 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp3222210
Published: 15 June 2022

2022 © Bauman et al. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.

Abstract

This personal reflection considers the challenges in co-creation in public health over time. The concept of ‘co-creation’ has existed in community health promotion practice for decades, and points to the perennial challenge to understand context and increase local engagement to solve complex community-wide health problems. While co-creation has become a ’fashionable term’ in health promotion, the challenge is that it remains a niche set of processes described in prevention programs. The schism between co-creation as ’process’ and policy makers’ need for health outcomes remains a barrier to widespread recognition and support. To fully realise the co-creation ‘dream’, we need a process of more committed co-production using democratised approaches to community engagement. This must be supported by long-term funding to mainstream the process and to demonstrate whether comprehensive co-creation makes an eventual difference in sustainable health outcome improvement.