By Ursula Duddy
A website created by local young people living in care to help others to gain access to health and well-being services in the Western Trust area has won a prestigious national award.
The site, younghealthhelp.com, was awarded the Best Co-Produced Project by the National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum at an awards ceremony in Manchester earlier this year.
The event was at Salford University and 90 local authorities took part. All the young people present voted on the best programme.
The National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum will be coming to Derry in January to speak with the involved parties about adapting and using the model in other trusts throughout the UK.
Darina Nash, aged 17, helped to create the free website alongside a number of other young looked after teenagers who all gained Open College Network (OCN) qualifications through developing the site.
Darina gave a presentation at Thursday’s meeting of the Board of the Western Trust, held at its headquarters in Altnagelvin Hospital alongside Malachy Daly, 16+ Development Manager.
Mr Daly explained how they came up with the site, which focuses on four main areas, sexual health, physical, substance abuse and online safety.
“We discovered that a lot of our young people, care leavers and looked after young people, were experiencing high levels of health inequality compared to young people in the community,” he said.
“They are more likely to experience mental health issues, more likely to be exposed to alcohol at a younger age and more likely to smoke and we identified the issues and thought about how we were going to get it out to the young people.
“You know that in a health centre there are leaflets but there is a lot of text-based information and a lot of young people wouldn’t access a health centre the way we would and if it was around a sexual health issue, for example, they were reluctant to go to a health centre and lift down leaflets in a public area.
“So with Health Improvement we approached the Public Health Agency and told them we were interested in doing something to improve well-being for young people and something that was accessible on their phones and somewhere they could get information.”
Mr Daly said that he and the young people came up with an app that could be accessed from their phone full of localised information within the Western Trust area.
The app has information, videos, scenarios and links directly to specific organisations, ChildLine, MOMO (Mind of my Own) and Lifeline, where you can click on the link and call immediately if you are in need. There is also contact information on the site for a number of other organisations that can help with a range of issues.
Speaking at the event, Darina Nash, a Thornhill College student, told the Western Health Board how proud she was to win the award for the site, which was sponsored by the Public Health Agency and was a year and a half in the making.
“I was such a good opportunity to be able to work on it and I use the app myself,” she said.
“The money, time and effort that went into it, even the colour scheme – every colour represents something and the actual icons, especially on sexual health, are just two bodies. You don’t want to discriminate against anybody; you don’t want to make it two boys, a boy and a girl – so we made the icon two gender neutral bodies.
“For the substance abuse icon, we use clear bottles because a study found if you are showing alcoholics bottles of alcohol it will make them want to drink so we didn’t use any specific labels or brands.
“For people that are illiterate or don’t have great reading skills or don’t want to read miles and miles of text there are videos there to help.
“If you’re in your bed on your own, 3am in a bad mind-set, you can just click on the links and they will instantly put you through to them. We wanted to promote how important your health is, not just physical health but mental health too.
“It’s such a brilliant app, I would recommend it to people.”
Mr Niall Birthistle, Acting Chairman of the Western Trust, commended the young people involved in making the app and called for the promotion of the site through schools.
“It’s so impressive on so many levels, it’s absolutely fantastic and the fact that it’s such a good app is why you won the prize for it,” he said.
Tom Cassidy, Assistant Director Corporate Parenting, thanked Kieran Downey, Director of Women & Children’s Service for his help and commended the young people who developed the app.
“We don’t want our looked after children to survive, we want them to flourish,” he said.
“We want them to move on into adulthood and look at Darina, that is what we want for our looked after children.”
Dr Dermot Hughes, Medical Director, also commented that he could take the app to doctors as a learning tool to show them the issues that are pertinent to young people today.
Joe Campbell, Non-Executive Director, said: “I’m very, very impressed because I can see loads of benefits and the app is transportable and the fact that it is young people developed the content and the engagement of young people in doing that, it can be rolled out to young people across the UK and beyond.
“The next stage of this is promotion and there’s a very good story to be told. Well done!”
Speaking to the Derry News after the presentation, Darina said she had enjoyed sharing their success in front of the Western Trust Board and explained how she became involved in developing the site.
“I’m a looked after child, I live with my auntie through Kinship Care and through social services, so my social worker mentioned it to me,” she said.
“I do look for opportunities to get myself out there and try and expand my skills. I hadn’t done ICT (Information and Communication Technology) since third year and didn’t do it for GCSE so when this opportunity came up it would give me an OCN (Open College Network) qualification for the future.”
Darina said she thought the app was a valuable tool for young people and spoke about understanding mental health issues as she has experience with some family members and friends suffering from problems and having lost a friend to suicide.
“I understand that sometimes young people might not always want to talk to a doctor or they may be embarrassed so I understand what the app can do and now it’s won a national award.
“I’m so proud we won the award; the honour that went through me, I was just so proud, we all were.”
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