Lizzie Wortley, AYPH Research Associate, talks about why our innovation event is so important to both clinicians, commissioners and policy makers across the UK.
In 2023 I set out to explore the different types of services available to young people in the UK as part of an AYPH exercise to understand more about what was happening on the ground. It was quite the challenge, and one person was never going to find every piece of innovation or good quality care out there, but it did provide for some interesting discussion.
This included defining what a health service was – were youth workers talking to young people about mental health a health service?; what a young people’s health service was – did it have to be a separate thing, or could young people be in any health service as long as they were acknowledged and adapted to?
At a similar time, I had been working setting up new services for young people as a paediatrician and trying to approach it in the most youth friendly way possible within the confines of the system – how can young people be intrinsically involved when you only have a few weeks to get something going and how can continual evaluation be built into the model?
These parallel experiences highlighted how few practical approaches were out there for busy clinicians on how to design and deliver better youth friendly services. It also showed how the expectations of commissioners and those reviewing services are often not aligned with how young people actually use services which can lead to challenges.
Since then, at AYPH we have been looking at all the ways we could find out what is happening in youth friendly services across the UK, and how we can be most helpful to our members, and advocate best for good quality, compassionate, youth friendly healthcare. Whilst we know about some amazing services, we feel that there are clinical groups that we are not hearing from who have opinions and experiences we should be exploring beyond our usual network.
So we decided to do something about it. We are having a whole day where we discuss and showcase the different experiences of services. We want to highlight how people are going about providing the best quality care they can for young people. But we don’t want to just show people finished products, we want to get into the nitty-gritty of how we can build change – the practicalities of making a service better, barriers people have come up against and how they succeeded, or maybe more interestingly, how they failed.
We need to talk about where compromises have been made, why and what the results were. The image you had in your head of what the service would be, and the reality you have manged to carry out. Praise pragmatism where it has worked, and place the spotlight on times it did not – not to name and shame, but to learn a collective lesson about what is happening, and our role within it. What commissioners have been looking for, how they have experienced feedback on services, and what they need to know.
Submissions for the learning event are not competitive, and it’s not about showing the best services in the country – of course celebrating excellence is a good thing, but we also want to learn in a non-exclusionary manner, and present examples and experiences that we think will benefit the most attendees.
I can’t wait until Tuesday 30th September comes around. I love feeling energised, inspired and excited about young people’s health in the UK, and fired up to do more. Working with passionate people is always a wonderful experience and it will carry us all through to International Adolescent Health Week in October with renewed vigour to be the change we want to see.
Note: This is a paid event, and we want as many people to attend in person as possible for networking, however we are aware this isn’t always possible. If you have something to share but can’t be with us on the day, that’s ok, we’d still like to share your work for the benefit of all. Whilst we like to put names to faces etc, we understand that particularly when talking about services that have struggled, you may wish to remain anonymous but still share the learning with others. Please do let us know if this is the case and we will contact individuals. Please also contact us if your team will find the ticket price difficult.
Author: Lizzie Wortley
July 2025