Children’s community health engagement
Engaging children and young people to co-produce a vision for community health services
Challenge
NHS Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board (BNSSG ICB) needed help to involve children and young people in co-producing a vision and ambition for their children’s community health services. This vision and ambition would be a key part of the procurement pack used to commission future community health services.
BNSSG ICB wanted to reach children and young people across their three local areas, ensuring they heard the voices of those who are often less heard.
Approach – How Blue Lozenge addressed the challenge
We used our 4-step approach and ensured that the voices of children and young people were at the centre of our work:
We began by conducting desk research and talking to local partners to map existing youth engagement in the area. We also worked with partners and the ICB to understand more about children and young people who live and access services across the BSSG patch and what barriers there were currently to accessing children’s community health services. Using this insight we then established a youth co-production group with young people who had lived experience of the community health services in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. This group helped us to events that would engaging and helpful to children and young people and shared their opinions on outputs from these events.
Our engagement strategy focused on creative and accessible methods which gave every child and young person we spoke to the opportunity to express their views meaningfully. Everything we heard and read was drawn together and used to inform the co-creation of a children and young people’s vision and ambition for their community health services.
Throughout this project, our core message was that children and young people are experts in their own healthcare, and their voices are fundamental to shaping the services designed to support them.
Impact
Throughout February and March 2026, we engaged more than 75 children and young people, aged 8 to 25, across the three local areas. We attended events at youth clubs, play centres, schools, and youth boards. We spoke to those with SEND, mental health needs, those in the care system and those from low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds.
Their insights were translated and analysed into a report, a visual vision and ambition and a 2-minute film. All of these outputs capture their vision for future children’s community health services in their own words. These outputs fed directly into two Theory of Change workshops with BNSSG ICB commissioners and system partners, helping to shape the framework that will inform the future procurement of children’s community health service.
