Involving more young people in your work

Speaking to people in your communities about their experiences of health and social care is at the heart of Healthwatch. However, getting some groups of people engaged can be more complicated than others.

Here, Healthwatch North East Lincolnshire share their top tips and four different approaches you can adapt to help you involve more young people in your work. 

Top tips for recruiting young people

We spoke to Tracy Slattery, Delivery Manager at Healthwatch North East Lincolnshire, to find out her top tips:

• Young people may not come to you to share their views. It’s up to you to go them. Find out if your area has youth clubs and centres. These are great opportunities for raising the profile of Healthwatch. Make local contacts with sports clubs catering to the age group and build relationships for future work  and consultation with young people.
• Selling your projects to young people can be difficult, so you have to make it engaging, and have short, medium, and long-term wins to keep them involved. Maintain contact, update them regularly and work with them. If they feel part of it from the start, they are more likely to stay engaged. Some young people leave halfway through projects but do not let this dishearten you, as they may have other life priorities.
• Develop a toolkit for your local Healthwatch that all staff and volunteers can use. Include campaign resources for young people, ice breaker exercises and a set of voting jars and counters that you can adapt for different events and topics
• Find out where their interests lie; it may be social media, marketing, speaking to people about their experiences or visiting services. Use co-production as a tool to interest them from the start.
• Young people may only work on one project as this is the only time they can commit. Like any volunteers, they may only want to micro-volunteer on a short-term project, as this is where their interest lies. As a local Healthwatch, the key is to work with them to make that happen.
• If you have a local Duke of Edinburgh Scheme, contact them and offer to give a talk about Healthwatch. Young people at the different levels of the award must carry out volunteering so you can help them complete their award.
• Consider offering certificates after 10 hours, 20 hours or 50 hours of volunteering.

We funded Healthwatch North East Lincolnshire to share how they’ve worked to involve young people with their work with others across the network and provide support to help colleagues replicate or adapt those successful methods.

We asked Tracy for her reflections on a small group of local Healthwatch coming together to discuss their approaches and what they all learned:

• The small group discussion approach worked well, and it was great to get a lot of e-mail contact and questions from the group between sessions.
• All eight group members got involved with e-mails, phone, and video calls. There was a clear commitment to participating and involving more young people in their work. 
• A top tip everyone learned was to contact pastoral care tutors and health and social care leads at colleges, as they can often be gatekeepers to large groups of young people and can work as brand advocates.
• Sharing resources as a follow-up was a great way to help people and save them time creating something from scratch—for example, the volunteer handbook and DBS guidance. 

What have local Healthwatch done as a result?

• One local Healthwatch is developing an action plan with the other local teams in their Integrated Care System (ICS) patch about how they can involve young people.
• Most of the group plans to work with higher and further education establishments.
• One local Healthwatch is working with health and social care students in partnership with their local college to gather rapid insight via surveys that students can do on their phones.