By Louca-Mai Brady,
We started our online meeting with introductions. We had two visitors to this meeting from the Adolescent Health Study, Kat and Laura, as well as familiar faces Claire and Jess from the SALIENT team. This was the first YPAG meeting of the new year, so it was great to catch up and discuss what we were looking forward to doing in 2025.
We then had a presentation from Claire with updates from the SALIENT project. Claire reminded us about the purpose of the study – to work out how changes to various parts of the food system can improve diet – and then gave us updates on the work they have been doing in the food aid store, online shopping and recipe boxes. We thought about what people might spend their money on if they’re not spending it on food. We thought it might be things such as heating, going to the cinema, and toiletries. We also talked about whether children would cook with their parents if given a recipe box – most of us agreed that it would be something we’d like to do.
It was great to have Claire back to give us an update on the SALIENT project. This has been one of the longest running research projects that we have been involved in. At the beginning of the project, we gave feedback about the trials before they had taken place, and now we are hearing about the results of the trials and discussing why these results may have occurred.
“It was great to be able to tell the group how the trials they have contributed to are progressing, and hear what they think the results will be” – Claire from the Salient study
After our session with SALIENT, we then spoke to Kat and Laura from the team leading the Adolescent Health Study. The Adolescent Health Study is a new study which aims to recruit around 100,000 young people aged 8-18 years old and to follow their health and wellbeing for a period of 10 years. The study is in its very early stages, so we spoke to the team about things we liked to do and how they could make the study appeal to children and young people.
Kat and Laura started off with a game which became progressively harder! We had to do the action they said e.g. if they told us to turn our head to the left we did so, but then they got us to do the opposite of what they said (when they said turn your head to the left, we had to turn our heads to the right)! They then asked us questions and we had one minute to type our answer for each question. This was a great way to get everybody to contribute and meant that we answered a lot of questions quickly.
“The YPAG group gave us so many useful ideas! They are such an engaged, switched-on and interesting group of young people and their input at the very early stage of our brand process for the Adolescent Health Study has been invaluable. We really hope we have the chance to come back in the future and show them how the brand is shaping up” – Kat Knight, Brand Strategist
At the end of the meeting, we talked about the YPAG 3rd Birthday party 🥳😁 we’re planning for our next meeting. We discussed ideas for games and activities, including making YPAG bracelets!
Following the GenerationR event in 2013, a report was written that highlighted 11 recommendations that reinforced several important recommendations for the involvement of children and young people in improving the design, development and delivery of paediatric research in the UK and beyond. One of the recommendations was to develop a systematic way to measure the impact of young people’s involvement activities.
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London is researching 3-dimensional models of congenital heart diseases.
We play Pictionary using research concepts intead of the usual game cards, allocated to different levels of difficulty.
