Children and Young Peoples’ Participation

1. Children and Young Peoples’ Participation

2. Why have young people’s Participation? • Increasingly recognised as a mark of a quality service • Belief that this is how ‘transformational change’ can be achieved • Supports direction government policy re: patients’ voice; ‘ No decision about me, without me’ • Is enshrined in role of HealthWatch • Central to successful bids for CYP IAPT • How do we know if this service is any good????

3. ‘You’re Welcome’ DH quality criteria for cyp friendly services • 10 themes for the criteria • 81% commissioners report that local services implement the guidelines • 64% services are involving young people inrating and evaluating their services

4. You’re Welcome: 10 criteria themes • Access • Publicity • Confidentiality and consent • Environment • Staff training, skills, attitudes and values • Joined up working • Involvement in monitoring • Health issues for young people • Sexual reproductive health services • Targeted and specialist CAMHS

5. The Participation Ladder • Helps define ‘what do we mean by participation?’ • Helps you clarify the level of participation you want to achieve your purposes • ‘Horses for courses’ approach • Need to consider ‘what is the purpose of the process?’ • Who benefits? • Who pays? • Who controls?

6. The Participation Ladder • Information: tell young people what is planned • Consultation: offer a number of options and listen to the feedback • Deciding together: you encourage young people to provide additional ideas + options and join in deciding the best way forward • Acting together: not only as above, but form a partnership to carry it out • Supporting independent initiatives: you help others do what they want – within a framework

7. Participation at Young Minds • Campaign for better services • Promote Emotional Wellbeing • Challenge Stigma • Work directly with services and young people to deliver service improvement

8. What do we do? • The VIK project: Nine workers are working directly with services in all English regions • We support a panel of young people aged 13 to 25 who have all experienced mental health problems • We work on a number of national projects with government departments, academic institutions and other charities • We work with colleagues across YoungMinds to facilitate the involvement of young people

9. What does participation mean to us? • Involving young people in all aspects of how mental health services are designed, delivered and assessed

10. Pyramid model

11. Training: Embedding Participation • The training is developed with young people and delivered by young people and staff • Participation training gives CAMHs clinicians and managers the tools they need to involve young people in service development • It can focus on any or all levels of the pyramid • “Really useful training and will make me consider how to involve young people more in developing services.” • “Gained a lot of insight into children/adolescents feelings about being a service user.”

12. Campaigning: Getting the message across • Campaigning with young people is important as their voices give real power to the message and make people sit up and listen • Gives the young people a real sense of purpose and an opportunity to influence at the highest level • This put children and young people’s mental health on public and policy makers agendas • This understanding of what is important to young people and why means increased and more appropriate investment

13. state of mind: What is important to young people in London? Don’t sideline mental health Make a real commitment to reducing stigma Help us to learn more about mental health Train the people who work directly with us Tell us where we can go when we need help Make it easier for us to get support and remove the barriers Don’t forget about us when we start getting older Combine services so they work better for us Services and communities need to understand us better and change Listen to us!

14. State of Mind: Achievements to date • Young People met with London mayoral candidates • Developed a campaigning resource for other young people • Statutory services ‘sign up’ to manifesto • The understanding of what is important to young people helps improve services and commissioning

15. Commissioning: involving young people Understand – existing service providers consult with young people to identify young people’s priorities that in turn inform the needs analysis. Plan – co-designed events are held to explore what services young people want, where and when and how these services should be delivered. Do – young people are involved with procurement processes. Young people may set specific young people’s assessment criteria within the tendering specification and assess this part of the application, or young people with high level support may be involved in the assessment of the full tender documentation. Young people have significant influence over awarding contracts and have the right to veto an organisation if they feel it isn’t going to meet their needs. Review – Young people are involved in service inspections and evaluating commissioned services. NYA: Getting it right for young people

16. IAPT: Improving access to psychological therapies The Department to Health set up a three year programme to improve access to a range of psychological therapies and they asked Young Minds to support children participation in the programme The aim is to Improve well being and mental health for children and young people and transform services Children and young people were involved in the process of recruiting the IAPT sites as well as developing nine indicators that services can use to map participation and monitor progress Collaboratives are expected to use this structured “map and plan” approach There is an expectation that service user participation is central to how the IAPT programme will be delivered at the sites Young people are involved in ongoing scrutiny of the Collaboratives as well as supporting them to improve Young people are involved locally as well as nationally in steering the project, providing information on IAPT to other young people and recruiting of the next phase of Collaboratives

17. Twelve tough questions for adults 1. What are we aiming to achieve? 2. Where have we got to so far? 3. What will children and young people get out of it? 4. Are we prepared to resource it properly? 5. Why have we not done it before? 6. Are we prepared to involve children and young people from the start? 7. Are we being honest with the children and young people? 8. What are our expectations? 9. Are we prepared to give up some power? 10. Are we prepared to take some criticism? 11. Do we recognise this as a long-term commitment? 12. Are we prepared to build in changes long-term and not just have a one-off event?

18. GETTING IN TOUCH Website: www.youngminds.org.uk/bond Email: bond@youngminds.org.uk Telephone: 020 7089 5050