Youth Voice and Partnerships
Youth Voice, Outreach and Community Partnerships
Foundations For Our Future, March 2022
Healthwatch East Sussex staff and a Young Healthwatch volunteer coordinated the East Sussex aspects of a Sector Connector conference focused on young people’s mental health and emotional wellbeing, hosted by Healthwatch Brighton and Hove.
This included running a break-out room where East Sussex professionals and delegates who work across young people and children’s services in the voluntary and statutory sectors, discussed:
- How can the Foundations For Our Future strategy best be taken forward?
- How can we use a whole system approach, encompassing the young service-user, the family, the professional and the education system?
- How can we work more collaboratively in future?
Our minutes from the East Sussex session can be found by clicking below, and include delegates’ perspectives and recommendations on partnership-working and youth engagement:
For additional information please visit the Healthwatch Brighton and Hove website here.
Foundations For Our Future is a pan-Sussex programme that is coordinating and monitoring the implementation of recommendations to improve opportunity and outcome of mental health and emotional wellbeing support for children and young people. To find out more about the programme, click here.
Sector Connector is our local Healthwatch in Sussex effort to regularly bring together community representatives, the voluntary and social enterprise sector and the local authorities to work more collaboratively on local issues. To find out more about this event, click here.
Physical Health Services and Young Patients, February 2022
In February, Young Healthwatch East Sussex met with the Children’s Commissioning Manager at Sussex NHS Commissioners. Our young volunteers used their knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm for young people’s issues and youth health services to feed into a consultation on children and young people’s physical health services.
The consultation aimed to “collect the voices of children, young people and their families”. You can find out more by clicking the link below.
Youth Voice in Psychiatry, August 2021
Young Healthwatch and East Sussex Community Voice young volunteers came together to participate in the ORS Consultation regarding the proposed relocation of East Sussex psychiatry services in the county. Young Healthwatch hosted a ‘drop-in’ consultation as a space for young volunteers to get involved in the consultation and share their thoughts with regard to:
- Transition from youth to adult mental health services
- Strengths of and barriers to, the proposed possible relocation sites
After lively debate, young people in attendance voted 100% in favour of relocation to Bexhill, but noted an array of issues, queries and questions regarding the relocation and issues that this might cause for young adults who are receiving inpatient care for their mental health and emotional wellbeing.
Young Healthwatch and East Sussex Community Voice’s further recommendations to the consultation can be read here.
The consultation, arranged by local NHS partners and managed by Opinion Research Services (ORS), seeked to glean public opinion and involve patients in the decision-making on the relocation of mental health inpatient hospital services from Eastbourne District General Hospital (DGH) to a choice of two sites, one in Bexhill and one outside of Hailsham. Find out more here.
