School based health services gain valuable insight

Earlier in the year Nayland College student Astrid Sayer was approached by Whanake Youth Manager Lee Ann O'Brien and asked if she was interested in taking part in a review of school based health services with a group named 'Te Tatau Kitenga.' Astrid explained that the group's name means "all of our perspectives or all of our insight" and the group was formed by the Ministry of Health as part of a five year review into school based health services.  

The Ministry of Health website states: "Te Tatau Kitenga has been established to provide expert advice and recommendations to the Ministry of Health on youth-related topics and services, especially for our priority groups: rangatahi Māori, Pacific young people, rainbow rangatahi, rangatahi in care and rangatahi with disability."  

Twelve students were recruited from around the country with Astrid and a Motueka High student being the only two representing the South Island. The youth committee started in August with emails and bi-weekly zoom meetings due to lockdown. Students were given a large amount of information to read through, submitted by all the different stakeholder groups such as the Ministry of Education, Oranga Tamariki and others. Their job was to read through all the information giving a youth perspective and also making suggestions for how to make the language easier for young people to understand. 

In the past few months Astrid has made two trips to Wellington to meet together with her fellow National Youth Committee members to talk about the documents and to share their thoughts, dreams and visions for school based health services and what young people actually need. She described how important it was for the organisation "actually hearing from young people and not their perceptions of what young people need."

"[We talked] about our visions and goals and what we want out of it and what young people need out of it, and what our dream hub would look like," she said. "[And] some of the problems within schools around mental health and health services in general, the stigma and the 'whakama' and the lack of knowledge of the students - 'where do I go?' 'what's available?' and that sort of thing."

Astrid noted that sometimes students are reluctant to seek support thinking that their problems aren't big enough. 

"We talked about everyone needs support, not depending on where on the scale you are in terms of how severe your health issues are," she said. "Everyone needs support and everyone should be offered support and everyone should know where to go."

At their most recent hui in Wellington the students gave a presentation to the stakeholders at the Ministry of Health. 

"It was really, really inspiring to hear everyone else's visions and ideas and then to have us tell our own ideas, backed up with our own personal experience and have a lot of them receive it really well," Astrid said. "There were a couple who got a little bit defensive because we were pushing at their ideas of what they thought their work was going to look like, which is guess means in some way we succeeded, so that was really interesting," she commented. 

When asked about her experience Astrid replied, "There was quite of pressure on our shoulders in some ways because it felt as though there were so many adults working towards this and then twelve of us youth who had to give the perspectives of everyone and we were the only youth who were going to have a say in all this, so it was a lot of pressure. In some ways it was a big responsibility but I quite enjoy responsibility."

The part she has enjoyed the most has been seeing future career opportunities. 

"My favourite thing about that hui, about these sort of opportunities, is I always come away gaining a clearer view or understanding of what could be out there for my possible career. There were people there that I looked at and thought, wow, I could do your job and that would be amazing."

Overall Astrid summed up her experience by saying she came away with three words:

"Fulfilled because I felt like we had been heard and we had done our job to the best of our ability with our presentation and speaking to the presentation."

"Heard."

"And 'expectant' because the next bit is the exciting bit really for us because as youth we were really focused on action versus policy. We're really excited to possibly get to meet with the Minister of Health Andrew Little and to see what comes of this next year."

Well done Astrid! We look forward to seeing all that comes through the National Youth Committee's contributions to School Based Health Services!