Young people's views on healthcare provision in Camden

Healthwatch Camden wanted to find out the health and social care issues young people aged fifteen to sixteen in Camden think are important to their demographic and also to find out how they like to be communicated to by health professionals and teachers. To this end they devised a Youth Social Media campaign week. 

Healthwatch collaborated with William Ellis School where the project was hosted and students were also drawn from LaSWAP. William Ellis School is a secondary comprehensive school for boys in Highgate. LaSWAP is a sixth form centre comprised of four small, but closely linked sixth forms. 

Healthwatch conducted five focus group sessions with the young people. The numbers at the sessions ranged from eleven and seven young people. Their ages ranged from fifteen to sixteen and most attended William Ellis School. They were broadly representative of students at the schools with both males and females participating and different ethnicities and religions. 

The health issues the young people said are most important to them and their peers were:

• Smoking
• Anxiety
• Confidentiality
• School nurses
• Workload
• Stress
• Anxiety
• Unprotected sex
• Body image
• Sexuality
• Drinks and drugs

What young people wanted to see changed included: 

•  It’s important to have someone to talk to.
• It’s important for schools and other organisations to present issues in a realistic way that young people can relate to, for example, having people coming to do talks who are long term homeless or in life imprisonment for drug offences is too far removed for young people to relate to. 
• There need to be more opportunities in school to talk to teachers or the school nurse in confidence. • School nurses should make an effort to see more pupils and make their presence known.
• Stigma in terms of sexuality and religions should be tackled more openly at school with teachers realising that bigotry is often learned at home and brought to school.
• A study found that fifty percent of Year 10 boys had high self-esteem scores compared to thirty-eight percent of girls1 . The young people Healthwatch spoke to said that their self-esteem is heavily influenced by social media. They said that there should be education in schools and voluntary organisations to let young people know that many celebrities and social media stars use altered images of themselves. This will help young people going through puberty to feel normal and confident in their appearance.
• The young people felt that they were confident to find services outside of school via the internet to help themselves where needed.