Transitioning out of youth involvement roles: an interview with a Youth Involvement Officer and Senior Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Lead

Within mental health research and service delivery, involvement of experts by experience has become increasingly common. The involvement of experts by experience allows for the design and delivery of research that is of higher quality and more rigorous.

Transitioning out of youth-focussed lived experience groups is a matter that is not well understood and, for many reasons, complex. It can be difficult to transition from the role of being a young contributor to research into a professional in the Public and Patient Involvement space. Working in lived experience roles, either as ‘lived experience practitioners’, ‘peer support workers’, ‘PPI facilitators’ or ‘involvement officers’ can be complex and the relationships you hold in these spaces vary depending on your positioning within either the group or the organisation (Carr, 2019).

In this blog we explore the experience of Beckye, a former Youth Advisory Group (YAG) member for the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Mental Health as she begins the making this transition into an employee in a Youth Involvement Officer. The blog takes the form of responses to an with Beckye (Youth Involvement Officer) and Niyah (Senior Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Lead). The interview offers early reflections that may be of use to organisations or individuals who may be supporting folk undertaking these transitions or in the process of negotiating the transition themselves.

LGBTQ+ training in social care should be mandatory for all social workers

Accessibility, Creating using evidence, Lived experience, Service Delivery, Social Service FuturesPower to Persuade25 October 2023Policy making, LGBTIQ+ issues, social care, social services

Implementing Trauma-Informed Care in the Proposed National Housing and Homelessness Plan

Exploring the pressing need for trauma-informed care in Australia's National Housing and Homelessness Plan, Research Fellow Chris Hartley sheds light on the deep links between trauma and homelessness while advocating for a unified, comprehensive approach to address the issue in line with global best practices.

Lived experience, Politics, Service DeliveryPower to Persuade11 August 2023housing and homelessness, trauma

Peer-led services: reducing barriers to healthcare for LGBTIQA+ people

LGBTIQA+ people are more likely to experience marginalisation, stigma, social exclusion, abuse, and violence than the wider community. Philippa Moss, CEO of ACT-based LGBTIQA+ peer-led health service Meridian, and Alison Barclay, researcher and social impact consultant, explain how peer-led services are helping to address this gap, and what more needs to be done.

A safe home for people with disability: the contrasting and complementary roles of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and Community Visitor schemes

In today’s post, moderator Dr Rae West @raelene_west discusses the balance between the roles of the NDIS Quality and Safeguarding Commission and Community Visitor schemes in deterring and preventing harm to people with disability utilising funded support services in accommodation settings and homes.

Advocacy, Policy and governance, Service DeliveryPower to Persuade1 May 2023Disability, NDIS

The sun is setting on archaic abortion laws in the West

In today’s analysis, Megan Elias discusses the impact of recent reforms to abortion law in Western Australia. Megan is a women’s and sexual health professional based in Boorloo, working across government and the not-for-profit sector. Megan is WA representative and Secretary for the Australian Women’s Health Network (@AusWomensHealth).

Residential Care and Place Attachments: The importance of location for children in UK care.

The sheer scale of placement breakdown and change for children in care in the UK has gathered increasing attention in recent years. We know that children and young people in residential care are more likely to experience placement breakdown and movement, often due to entering care later in adolescence, or being placed children’s homes which are inappropriate to meet their needs as a short term or emergency measure. It has also been noted that private residential placements can pose significant financial costs to local authority children’s services. In this blog, Helen Woods argues that it is vital then to consider what contributes to the success or failure of a residential placement.

The Robodebt Royal Commission Starts Today: Let the Blame Game Begin

Policy and governance, Service Delivery, Finance and economicsPower to Persuade31 October 2022welfare conditionality, welfare-to-work, Royal Commission, unemployment

How health justice partnerships transform responses to family, domestic, and sexual violence

Many women who experience family violence, many reach out to a healthcare professional. In today’s analysis, Dr Joyce Chia (@JoyceKWChia), Policy & Advocacy Lead at Health Justice Australia (@HealthJusticeAu), asks how we can better equip the health system to respond to violence against women and children. Health Justice Australia is a national not-for-profit centre of excellence that supports the expansion and effectiveness of health justice partnerships.

Finding support outside the NDIS

Since Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme was created nearly ten years ago, its roll out has been closely scrutinised by governments, policymakers, researchers, and advocates. Dr Sue Olney, Dr Amber Mills and Liam Fallon discuss their research into how working-age people with disability without NDIS funding are faring. Their findings reveal a huge gap between talk and action on disability inclusion.

Paving the way for innovation in adult social care in the UK

Innovation is at the heart of plans to reform adult social care across the four UK nations. In this blog, Nuffield Foundation POST Fellow, Katherine Davis explains that conversations with people who have experience of adult social care are vital to effective innovation.

Low school belonging is affecting young people’s education and employment after school

Whether a child feels they belong at school can have a significant impact on their prospects after graduating from high-school. Dr Rhiannon Parker discusses her recent research that shows that low school belonging is a risk factor for whether someone is Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET) after leaving compulsory schooling.

Service DeliveryPower to Persuade29 April 2022education, young people

Can health literacy help us address health inequities, or is that asking too much of the overworked concept?

Health literacy is increasingly seen as a way to reduce health inequities. But are we relying too heavily on a concept that is becoming too broad to wield? Dr Jane Lloyd discusses if and how we can improve health literacy to address disadvantage.

Accessibility, Service DeliveryPower to Persuade27 April 2022public health

The NDIS – from then to now

In today's post, Dr Raelene West (@raelene_west) discusses the history and current state of Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme. She argues that the NDIS is at a critical juncture, and that its success hinges on people with disability having a more significant role in its design and delivery. Dr West is a sociologist based at the Melbourne Disability Institute at the University of Melbourne, and she has lived experience of disability.

Service Delivery, AccessibilityPower to Persuade7 December 2021NDIS, Disability, policy problem, implementation

Youth partnership in suicide prevention research: A co-designed GP guide for young people with self-harm or suicidal experiences.

Young people with lived experience of self-harm or suicidal behaviour should be at the forefront of designing, evaluating and implementing suicide prevention research.

Controversial? Unfeasible? Risky?

You name it. As a suicide prevention researcher I have heard it all…by funders, ethics committees, Higher Education Health and Safety committees to name a few.

In this blog, I (Dr Maria Michail) share my experience of working in partnership with young people with lived experience of self-harm and suicidal behaviour to co-design of a guide titled “Visiting your General Practitioner: A guide for young people with lived experience of self-harm and suicidality”.

Australia's First Charter of Rights for Parents and Families

Advocacy, Innovation, Policy and governance, Service DeliveryPower to Persuade28 September 2021Children, family, Policy making, human rights

Agency in Youth Mental Health

This post by Lisa Bortolotti is a re-post in a series of posts on a project on agency and youth mental health funded by the Medical Research Council and led by Rose McCabe at City University, UK. Lisa is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for Mental Health. In this post she answers four questions about her work on agency in youth mental health.

Transitions from care to adulthood: exploring historical narratives

The evidence has been well publicised: young people who have spent their formative years in public care are less likely than their peers to be in gainful employment, and more likely to become homeless, to become involved in crime or prostitution or to become long-term dependent on the state. A closer inspection of the data tends to reveal a much more nuanced picture: a small group of care leavers are ‘movers on’ who achieve educational, employment and wellbeing outcomes that are similar to those of their peers in the general population. A much larger group are survivors: they enter care significantly behind their peers in key areas of development and although, given the right support, they make progress, it takes time to narrow the gap, and their achievements, occurring relatively late in life, often go unrecognised. Only a relatively small group of care leavers fit the stereotype and struggle with very poor outcomes.

Nevertheless, we need to understand why, despite more evidence of success than is often acknowledged, the transition to adulthood from care can be problematic for too many young people who have been the responsibility of the state. In this blog, Harriet Ward and Mike Stein explore the transitions from care to adulthood through exploring historical narratives.

Radically rethinking child protection work with the four pillars of institutional justice capital.

Australia’s child protection systems have long failed the families and children it was designed to protect. The structural injustices of the child protection system can be tackled by building institutional justice capital. This must include parental rights, non-violence, respectful relationships and public debate argue Dr Sharynne Hamilton and Dr Sarah Maslen.

Advocacy, Service DeliveryPower to Persuade3 May 2021Children, justice, social services, human rights

‘Dehumanising’ and ‘a nightmare’: why disability groups want NDIS independent assessments scrapped

In today’s post, originally published in The Conversation, Professor Helen Dickinson (@drhdickinson) outlines concerns about the introduction of independent assessments into Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme, and explains why an independent evaluation of the proposed changes, designed in consultation with people with disability and their families, is needed before they are introduced.

Issues, Policy and governance, Service DeliveryPower to Persuade16 March 2021NDIS

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