Health and Youth Work | The University of Manchester

Health and Youth Work study

Exploring youth work services for young people with long-term conditions (physical and/or mental health) in the UK.

Health and Youth Work is a research project investigating how youth work services for young people with long-term physical and/or mental health conditions (LTCs) in the UK are organised, provided and experienced to inform service commissioning and delivery.

We want to find out the best way of providing youth work services to improve the health and wellbeing of young people with LTCs, specifically:

The types of youth work services available in the UK for young people with LTCs.
What young people like and don’t like about these services, and what helps them.
What parents and professionals think about youth work services.
How youth work services work with other services.

On this page:

What we are doing
Outputs
Who we are
Contact us

What we are doing

The study has two stages.

Stage 1

We developed and disseminated a survey for youth workers (now closed) to find out what types of youth work services there are for young people with LTCs in the UK.

Stage 2

We will select six youth work services from the survey to compare different ways of providing youth work.

We will study these services in detail and talk to young people, parents, professionals and managers about their views on the services. We will also look at documents about services and observe youth work sessions.

What will we do with our results?

We aim to co-develop an evidence-based service development framework to guide the commissioning, organisation and provision of youth work services. We will produce reports about our findings throughout the study, and hold a webinar at the end.

View the full project timeline

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Outputs

See the latest outputs from the different work packages in our project.

View outputs

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Who we are

The Health and Youth Work project is being conducted by a research team and an advisory group comprising 12 young people.

Research team

Susan Kirk (Co-Principal Investigator) – Professor of Child and Family Health, The University of Manchester
Marie Marshall MBE (Co-Principal Investigator) – Associate Director of Nursing Research and Innovation, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
Rosie Gordon (Project Researcher) – Research Associate, The University of Manchester
Claire Fraser (Project Researcher) – Research Fellow, The University of Manchester
Nic Rigby (Public, Patient, Inclusion and Engagement (PPIE) Co-lead) – Senior Youth Worker, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
Rosie Naylor (Public, Patient, Inclusion and Engagement (PPIE) Co-lead) – Public Engagement Consultant
Nicola Evans (Co-investigator) – Reader, Cardiff University
Albert Farre (Co-investigator) – Senior Lecturer, University of Dundee
Rajesh Patel (Co-investigator) – Youth Work Consultant
Donna Hilton (Co-investigator) – Youth Service Manager, Nottingham Children’s Hospital
Michael Devine (Co-investigator) – Commissioning Manager, NHS Greater Manchester ICB
Ruth Marshall (Co-investigator) – Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
Suzanne Coney (Co-investigator) – Consultant Paediatrician, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust

Young People’s Advisory Group (YPAG)
(also known as T.R.U.S.T.)

There are 12 young people from across the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) in our YPAG. Our research team will work with them across both stages of the study to make sure all of our work is relevant and matters to young people.

They will help us to:

develop the study materials
understand the best way to carry out the research
understand the findings
co-develop the guidance for developing youth work services.

We will also work with the young advisors to create messages about our research to share online so that people hear about what we find. Parents/carers will also be involved in this.

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