Overview

We aimed to develop a diverse youth forum with young people aged 12-18 from across Scotland, with the purpose of informing mental health research across the University of Edinburgh’s (UoE) three colleges. Currently mental health researchers within the University are repeatedly recruiting young people for research advisory roles (YPAGs). They often approach the same organisations, spending vast amounts of time creating promotional materials and yet still struggling to find young people in good time to inform research. The project aimed to establish important initial infrastructure for a youth forum that could be used widely by mental health researchers across the University working in a wide range of disciplines. This infrastructure would offer progression and support for young people currently involved in short term youth advisory groups or equivalent research focus groups and a reliable source of youth consultation for mental health research teams across UoE. The development of a long-standing youth forum at the University of Edinburgh would provide efficient, coordinated and meaningful input for researchers, as well as a platform for young people's voices to link into mental health research.

Outcomes

There is a strong appetite for a long-standing mental health youth forum at the University of Edinburgh. There was a lot of interest and support from both researchers and young people to be part of this type of platform and I still receive emails from researchers who want to include the forum in their future research. Sadly, it has been challenging to secure the funding to make this a reality and it is difficult to get support to create the infrastructure.

We had been overambitious with what would be achievable given the timescale and how difficult it is to establish a group from scratch and so some of the objective were not met. As the group was so new, more time was spent on team building and developing relationships which meant that we were unable to co-produce a protocol and videos/materials to encourage more, and more diverse, young people to engage in health research. If we had more time, funding and support I believe that this would have been achievable.

Future Directions

I submitted a large funding bid to UKRI which received really good feedback, but was unfortunately unsuccessful. I have attended 3 funding information sessions and will be applying for more funding over the next couple of months. The youth forum has also been costed into 2 bids by researchers across the University, but both are very small amounts (£3k each, which would only support reimbursement of young people and expenses). Four researchers have also asked if they can explore collaboration with a youth forum, but we ultimately need funding for the infrastructure and staffing costs (I am currently supporting the young people on a voluntary capacity as it is slightly different to my remit).

I would love to secure funding to make a mental health youth forum/youth voice permanent. I feel there is still so much more potential and opportunity to grow something incredible at the University with the right support.