South Tyneside Youth Health Ambassadors are a group of volunteers aged 14-17. The ambassadors have been trained to undertake inspections of health services, to offer information and advice to their peers and to run their own health campaigns’. The ambassadors act as advocates for their peers to make health services better for young people in South Tyneside. South Tyneside Sexual health opened up its doors to the health ambassadors, providing an insight as to what the service offers and giving the young people a guided tour of the clinic.
Here is what the health ambassadors had to say
On Monday 16th July, I made another visit to Palmer’s sexual health clinic to meet with one of their staff members in regard to looking through some questionnaire statistics from a select number of students. We were trying to look at different methods to which sexual health services can reach wider numbers of young people, in particular Palmer’s sexual health clinic. We understood that getting young people through the doors to these services is actually the hardest part and Palmers is really trying to advertise their services more and make themselves much more accessible to the younger generation. When we visited the services in January, we, as health ambassadors, noticed a small number of things which we felt the service could do to improve how they operate, such as minor improvements to the website to make it more accessible and user friendly. Since then, Palmers have acted upon our suggestions and it was a pleasure to meet with their staff for the 2nd time. I hope it won’t be the last time which we work together and hopefully there will be many more times in the future which we can visit the services which Palmers has to offer young people.