Young Healthwatch
About Us
Young Healthwatch East Sussex is a youth voice group set up to shine a spotlight on the health and care issues that face children and young people across our county. We combine traditional youth work practices with creativity, technology, and youth leadership, to create an exciting and engaging program for local young people to act as community ambassadors and support our projects and campaigns on children and young people’s health topics.
Our aims
- To capture young people’s experiences of the Health & Social Care sector in East Sussex.
- To engage young people to better understand the services that are available to them locally.
- To work with young people to ensure their voice is heard by those planning, commissioning, and delivering Health & Care services locally and nationally.
- To engage with young people across East Sussex and capture their experiences of Health and Social Care.
- To promote the involvement of young people in the monitoring, commissioning, and provisioning of health and social care services.
Putting Young People at the heart of community engagement…
We offer young people chances to volunteer in their local community. Through volunteering with us, young people learn leadership skills, gain confidence and new friendships, and a developed understanding of the integrated care system and local issues & debates in the health and care landscape.
We are led by young people, with lead volunteers steering our work, supported by a young staff member who coordinates sessions and activities with other members of the Healthwatch East Sussex staff team.
We are proud to be youth-led, and we welcome the ideas, feedback and suggestions of any young person, allowing us to progress and grow. Through working with our volunteers, we can use engagement methods which work best for young people, and we are excited at the prospect of learning from our volunteers about what resonates best with a youth audience and what issues are most important for them.
Spreading awareness and communicating
Our young volunteers use their knowledge and skills to create engaging and innovative content and share important information on key issues affecting children and young people today.
We are currently developing content with our young people to spread awareness on different health and care topics, so check back soon for more!
Developing Local Services and Strategy
We work with health and care partners to share the experiences of young people with lived experience of health and care, so that experts by experiences are shaping policy and strategy with system leaders in East Sussex. We use surveys, focus groups, drop-in sessions, outreach events, mystery shopping and Enter & View visits, to talk to young people and gather views.
