Youth Voices was established to improve the service quality and provision offered by the Trust. We want to ensure that young people aged 13 - 25, of all backgrounds, regardless of whether they have engaged with our services, can share their experiences and have a chance to improve services for all children and young people. Youth Voices are involved with a variety of work, from reviewing healthcare material, suggesting improvements to services, and developing resources.
Our work sits within the Trust’s strategic priorities, in particular objective 1.
“We will put service users at the heart of all we do, supporting effective care, recovery and wellbeing”.
Our focus is to ensure that young people take the lead and that their voices are heard and valued to influence positive trust-wide improvements. Youth Voices aims to be viewed by the trust and outer organisations as partners. It is critical to Youth Voices that a supportive environment is maintained to allow young people to share their thoughts without criticism and feel confident to challenge views.
Youth Voices meets monthly on MS Teams in the late afternoons and evenings as this is the most accessible time for our members. In addition to this, we also have established smaller focus groups, whom wish to engage more closely in certain projects. Youth Voices adapts all its materials in an easy read format so that every young voice is given equal opportunity to be heard.
Our inpatient unit for young people, The Cove hosts a weekly meeting called ‘participation meeting’ which aims to engage young people in discussing their experience on the ward and share any concerns and feelings about their care. Any issues highlighted will be referred to the appropriate person and investigated further, we also share meeting minutes for those who were unable to attend. We provide a ‘you said we did’ informing the young people of what we have done about what they have fed back. I think that this supports delivery of good care as service users are listened to and considered in their day to day life.
Thank you Naomi Hardman and Emma Wakefield for sharing your story.