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NIHR Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) Bradford was launched in 2023 with funding from NIHR. The aim of the HDRC Bradford is to sustainably transform the council, so it becomes evidence-led, and data driven, at all levels of decision-making to reduce health inequalities.
In November 2024, the HDRC held a ‘takeover event’ to enable young people to feed directly into the setting of research priorities for Bradford Council. At the event, 40 young people from 8 youth voice groups attended and were asked to share their priorities, lived experiences and ideas for improving outcomes with the members of the Children, Young People and Families Executive Board.
In preparation for the event, the HDRC collated existing insights from the council and partner organisations around the priorities of children and young people in relation to the wider determinants of health. They then mapped these against priorities
in the Council’s Children and Young People’s strategy.
3 priority themes were identified:
Education and skills development
Safe homes, places and communities
Physical and mental health
These were underpinned by 2 cross-cutting themes:
Participation, involvement and voice
Tackling inequalities and discrimination
The themes were reviewed with Bradford’s Youth Ambassadors, who were supported to develop additional research questions to address areas where it was identified more insight was needed.
The Youth Ambassadors then undertook a number of research visits to organisations representing different groups of young people to explore their priorities in relation to the identified themes. The findings from the research visits were collated into one-page summaries to help provide a focus for the takeover event.
At the event, members of the Children, Young People and Families Executive Board were split into 4 groups and placed into separate breakout rooms, based on the 4 event themes. 40 young people rotated around the breakout rooms to share their priorities and ideas around each theme, before reconvening to reflect on the topics discussed.
The top 3 priorities identified were:
Creating more opportunities to develop life skills
Developing peer support schemes for mental health and wellbeing
Giving children and young people more voice in decision-making
Attendee feedback showed there is an appetite for similar meetings in the future by both young people and board members. Further work around the top priorities identified will be taken forward in collaboration with other decision-makers and partners who have committed to have their own ‘takeover’ approaches and to embed youth voice into decision-making as a result of this project.
Following the success of this process, HDRC Bradford is considering how it can integrate this approach into wider work to develop ‘areas of research interest’.
This page is available as a PDF, this webpage is the accessible version.
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