COVID19: Children and Young People’s Voice

The RCPCH &Us Team provides engagement resources created with and for children, young people and their families:

1. The Health Diary allows children and young people to write and draw their feelings, activities, thoughts and questions to share with their families and healthcare teams.
2. ‘Being Me’ resources include ‘passports’, posters and games to help children and young people share who they are, how they are feeling and what support they would like with healthcare professionals.
3. The Emoji Card Game enables a young person to pick the cards that best represent how they are feeling, prompting them to discuss difficult topics and open up a dialogue with healthcare teams.
4. ‘Recipes for Engagement’ supports healthcare professionals to find out what families using their services think. With a cooking theme, the easy-to-use practical guide gives tested ideas and activities to creatively engage children and young people in co-designing for improvement.

Information about COVID-19 for children and young people and their families is available from RCPCH here.

A short video created by Alder Hey Children’s Hospital about COVID-19 for children and young people is available here.

Other useful resources include:

•  ‘Viruses and Vaccines’ developed by a team of pathologists, creatives and public engagement practitioners at the Royal College of Pathologists helps facilitate informed discussions about viruses and vaccines with children and young people. It includes art-science resources, guides to hands-on STEM activities for schools, video interviews, and an FAQs section.
• COVID-19 resources for children, young people and families collated by the National Institute for Health Research Children and Young People MedTech Co-operative team here.
• UNICEF updates from the global community and their Voices of Youth campaign here.
• The WHO Parenting for Lifelong Health programmes have developed a set of open-source online COVID-19 parenting resources available in over 50 languages and an associated webinar hosted by the International Society for Quality in Health Care is available here.
• A child welfare and pandemics literature search conducted by the Fraser Mustard Institute of Human Development at University of Toronto was recently published on the Canadian Child Welfare Research Portal here. An accompanying webinar hosted by the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect is available to watch here.