As part of the new Young People’s Health and Wellbeing Pilot in Southwark, which is being supported by the Well Centre, we ran a focus group to help co-produce the new service. Southwark’s Health and Wellbeing Practitioner, Hannah Sidwell, shares the findings.
Young people know what issues matter most in their lives, and professional assumptions don’t always match their reality, so it is important for us to ensure young people have space, voice, audience and influence in this project.
In September we were joined by five brilliant young people from Step Out mentoring at Villa Street Medical Centre. The aim of the session was to capture youth voices to build a service model that reflects local needs and one which can be shared with other boroughs. We held various discussions exploring what challenges young people face, where young people go for help and support, and what is most important to them when accessing services.
What challenges do young people face
We wanted to understand what struggles young people face locally, nationally and globally. When considering these challenges, we looked at three different categories: Body/Physical Health, Mind/Mental Health and Social life.
Body/physical health: The group talked about difficulties with sleep, hygiene and unhealthy diets as well as struggles with addiction including smoking, vaping and alcohol.
Mind/mental health: The young people explained the negative impacts of social media and phone addiction on mental health. We explored how online access can lead to cyberbullying as well as unwanted access to adult content and pornography. Feelings of loneliness, low self-esteem, depression, eating disorders and experiences of trauma also came up.
Social life: The main themes that emerged around social life were gang violence and the lack of safe spaces for young people in the community and at home. Issues around housing and the cost-of-living crisis was felt to add pressure to this. We discussed relational difficulties with friendships and family and how this can lead to social isolation and loneliness.
Where do young people go for help and support?
As one large group the young people shared the places they currently go for support, help or advice. These included parents and family members, trusted teachers, mentors, helplines, therapy and doctors (sometimes). They described what they liked about these places: all the young people agreed spaces outside of family and home made it easier to talk freely knowing that it would be private. They felt less alone, more understood, respected and not judged. Almost unanimously they agreed their main dislikes were around confidentiality being broken by teachers, doctors and trusted friends.
School was not felt to be place they went for help. Main reasons given were around information being shared to other teachers and parents and difficulty asking for help with so many students around. They expressed school was however a good place for experts in healthcare, physical fitness and nutrition to come in and give talks in assemblies.
Ladder of importance
The young people were each provided with a set of 11 possible features of a new youth-focused health service, which they had to rank in order of importance. Afterwards this involved discussion around the ordering of the list.
Four out of five young people had confidentiality / privacy as their top item, the fifth young person had it at number two. Also high on the list was drop-in clinics; meeting other young people from the service; and having a fun and welcoming space.
Confidentiality and trust appear to be central to young people’s views perhaps based off their positive and negative experiences of this. Interestingly this group is part of a service that offers young people a chance to connect with others using the service, this is clearly a valuable part of their experience as they all placed this highly. ‘Staff who understand your background’ led to conversations around preferring staff who have personal experiences in their struggles. Being close to school/home was agreed to be unimportant, with one young person stating they preferred it to be further away from home for the separation and privacy.
Overall the discussions held have been crucial in helping us think about the landscape of Southwark, what the current need is for young people, where their priorities lie and what the barriers to access are.
For more about the work of HWPs, contact WCC’s CEO, John Poyton.