The field of health promotion practice and research has undertaken the challenge of “enabling people to increase control over, and to improve their health” (WHO, 1986, p1). In the Ottawa Charter, the active engagement of citizens is presented as a priority. Professionals from all sectors should be involved in health promoting community capacity building strategies and strengthened citizen participation (Dempsey et al., 2011). Professionals indeed have the potential to support the development of community skills and knowledge, yet they need specific knowledge and skills to do so. Professional development is essentiel to frame the development of such participatory practices. However, it is difficult to anticipate and identify what type of skills professionals need to promote co-creation in communities, and what type of skills they need to promote the development of such skills in community members. The issue of how to promote the participatory processes that are so desperately needed to identify citizens’ needs and address them remains unresolved. 

Our aim was to identify the competencies professionals need to promote co-creation engagement within communities.Our research undertook to answer the following: what competencies do health promotion professionals need to support co-creation processes in communities? What competencies do health promotion professionals think communities need to engage in co-creation?

This study was undertaken within an ERASMUS+ co-creation project in welfare sectors (EC project number: 2016-1-DK01-KA202-022342). Participants were professionals in a position to promote co-creation processes in health promoting welfare settings across Denmark, Portugal, France, and United Kingdom. An overarching unstructured topic guide was used within interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and creative activities.

The need to develop competencies to promote co-creation was high across all countries. Creating a common understanding of co-creation and the processes involved to increase inclusivity, engagement, and shared understanding was also necessary. Competencies included: how to run co-creation from the beginning of the process right through to evaluation, using feedback and communication throughout using an open action-oriented approach; initiating a perspective change; and committing to the transformation of co-creation into a real-life process. Practical implications Overall, learning about underlying principles, process initiation, implementation and facilitation of cocreation were areas identified to be included within a co-creation training programme. This can be applied through the framework of enabling change, advocating for co-creative processes, mediating through partnership, communication, leadership, assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation and research, ethical values, and knowledge of co-creative processes. Originality/value This study provides novel findings on the competencies needed for health promoting professionals to embed co-creative processes within their practice, and the key concerns that professionals with a position to mediate co-creation have in transferring the abstract term of co-creation into a real-world practice.

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