People’s lived experience is at the heart of everything we do. We seek opportunities for people with experience of mental health problems to get involved and guide our work. Now, we want to focus on children, young people and families to shape, influence and design services that will support them.
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Young people are experiencing more mental health challenges than ever. In Teesside, those from the lowest incomes are 4.5 times more likely to experience severe mental health problems. We want to create more opportunities for young people to be involved in our work. Why? Its easy to talk about young people rather than have conversations with them. Adults can make choices about their needs rather than decisions with them. We’re working to reverse this, empowering young people to shape our work.
We’ve developed an Influence and Participation plan and want to broaden this to encompass children, young people and families with lived experience. We’ll give them the opportunity to shape and develop our work; what’s prioritised and how it’s planned, delivered and evaluated. Young people will be influencing decision making, this could be through completing a survey, taking part in a focus group, contributing to decision-making on an advisory group or co-producing a service plan for a project.