YEAH project – co-creating health research education with young people

By Liverpool YPAG,

It gives me great pleasure to announce the official start of the YEAH project, Youngsters EngAgement in Health.  This collaborative project led by Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital in Barcelona in partnership with the University of Liverpool began in January 2020.

The consortium is formed by:

  • Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona Children’s Hospital (Coordinator)
  • The University of Liverpool.
  • Universitat de Barcelona.
  • Institut de Formació Continuada (IL3-UB).
  • Bayer AG.
  • Sanofi.

The funding from the EIT Health initiative was successfully obtained to co-create the development of a training programme to ensure that all members of existing YPAGs working across Europe are trained within a standard curriculum of contents. This training programme will be shared via the European Young Person’s Advisory Group Network (eYPAGnet) and implemented in schools that are interested to educate young people to be involved in activities of citizen science in the health and research setting.

The YEAH project, Youngsters EngAgement in Health, is focused on the development of four modules:

  • Patient and Public involvement.
  • Protocol Design.
  • Quality of life and patient reported outcomes.
  • Educational and informative materials.

Young members of GenerationR Liverpool and Barcelona YPAGs will co-create content and activities, during 4 workshops guided by educational experts, at the same time of building a programme to facilitate the involvement of youngsters in clinical and trial research, across different European countries.

This is a really important project as Coordinator of YEAH, Begonya Nafria declares:

“Unfortunately children and young people suffer diseases so they deserve the same opportunities as adult patients to be involved in the design and conduct of health research projects. We learn with them when we include them as a part of our projects. The most important benefit is that involving young people results in the delivery of better initiatives and ultimately better medicines for children and young people”.

Partner of YEAH, Jenny Preston reiterates this point:

“This is an amazing opportunity for young people to co-create education materials to learn about the design and conduct of health research projects.  More importantly this will teach and empower young people to become co-creators of health research, which may result in research projects that are designed and fit for purpose for future research involving children and young people”.

The first co-creation workshop will be taking place on the 27th and 28th February in Liverpool.  Further details of this workshop will be shared in the coming weeks.

For further information about this project, please contact Jenny Preston @jennifer.preston@liverpool.ac.uk or Jenny Ainsworth @jenny.ainsworth@liverpool.ac.uk