By Vijay Tailor-Hamblin,
On Saturday 27th January we had a YPAG session, our first of 2024
We started off our YPAG session with an ice breaker. Vijay asked us, “if we could teach one topic, what would we teach?” Everyone gave their answers as well as their name and age. Topics ranged from cooking to indoor climbing and the history of women’s football.
Vijay then showed us a questionnaire that would be given to young people. We were asked what improvements we could make to better support the young children. We discussed as a group ideas of how the form could be presented to the young person, as well as the layout and question, and which would be easiest to read. We also gave advice on how to design the study session for the young people, we though 5 hours was too long!
We then tested out different eye drop bottles and the consistency of the drops. We discussed what would be best for children to take during the day and during the night. This was to help young people use drops that wouldn’t disappear too quickly to help with healing of the cornea – the front clear part of the eye.
As a group we learnt about when a person’s eyelid droops – called ptosis. This condition can happen for many reasons but sometimes it can be variable when it is half closed and half open and this can stop people seeing properly. We were talking about when this happens because the mitochondria in the eyelid isn’t functional which makes the eyelid hard to open. There is a study using red-light running at the moment and they have an information video.
Annegret wanted to create a video to help raise awareness of red-light treatment in short sightedness. Red light treatment is a treatment where a patient would put a red glowing light on their eyes to help with reducing the progression of short-sightedness. As this idea hasn’t been fully developed, we helped in choosing the pictures and characters and decided who we would like for the video to ensure it was inclusive to everyone.
We ended off the day with a researcher coming in to talk about mental health for people with a visual impairment. She asked us questions about how sleep can affect our mental health and how sleep is affected with someone who has a visual impairment.
We are looking forward to the next meeting! Vijay is ordering pizza!!!
Report from a recent meeting attended by Nottingham YPAG member Scarlet Jordan
In this video from the inaugural Generation R meeting in 2013, YPAG members lead a discussion of why medical research is important.
These scenarios have been developed and tested by Generation R YPAGs.
