Developing a Statewide Strategy for Meaningful Youth Engagement: Insights from a Youth-Driven Program in Wisconsin.

PURPOSE: There are various ways to integrate the lived experiences and perspectives of youth and young adults into Maternal Child Health (MCH) goals, initiatives, and programs. This article describes the history, evolution, and current strategy of a program that engages youth from across the state of Wisconsin. It serves as an example for others who may be interested in building capacity for youth leadership and engagement. DESCRIPTION: The Providers and Teens Communicating for Health (PATCH) Program started as a community-based pilot project and evolved into a robust statewide youth engagement infrastructure. CONCLUSION: Meaningful youth engagement requires capacity, adaptability, and expertise. Thus, in this case, it has proven advantageous to develop complementary and mutually beneficial partnerships to support adolescent health more effectively and efficiently in Wisconsin.

Engaging Youth in Public Health: Evaluation of Short-term and Long-term Participation in the PATCH Youth Advocacy Fellowship.

CONTEXT: Authentic youth engagement is widely recognized as an efficacious strategy to promote adolescent health. PROGRAM: The Providers and Teens Communicating for Health (PATCH) Youth Advocacy Fellowship was created to support Wisconsin's Adolescent Health Program. It strives to bring youth voice to the forefront of adolescent health conversations while also providing young people the knowledge, skills, and opportunities to thrive into adulthood. IMPLEMENTATION: The Fellowship hires and trains Wisconsin youth, aged 12 to 21 years, to be a part of community- and state-based adolescent health conversations. Youth meet regularly as a team for ongoing enrichment and are provided opportunities to consult on adolescent-focused projects and initiatives. They are also responsible for independently completing an advocacy learning series, which culminates in an advocacy plan on a topic of personal interest. The Fellowship has been implemented as an extended 9-month program, as well as an expedited 8-week pilot. EVALUATION: An evaluation was conducted to compare the 8-week pilot (summer 2018) with 51 youth and the sequential 9-month Fellowship (2018-2019) with 12 youth. Based on the quantitative analysis of 2 programmatic evaluations (posttraining and postprogram), both program models showed success. Yet, there were distinct differences among self-reported youth outcomes as well as depth and extent of engagement. Across all 14 domains, the 9-month cohort demonstrated consistently higher mean scores. Half of the domains (7) showed statistically significant differences. DISCUSSION: When considering youth engagement, it is important for practitioners to determine the goals, needs, capacity, and resources of both youth and the organization. Engaging youth for shorter-term commitments may serve as an important health education strategy, providing youth important knowledge and skills. Yet, engaging youth for extended periods of time may result in more meaningful engagement, fruitful projects, and substantial changes in positive youth development.

Enhancing Communication Among Adolescents and Health Care Providers: Evolution and Evaluation of Youth-Driven Initiative Addressing Barriers.

BACKGROUND: Significant interpersonal barriers impede the delivery of quality adolescent health care. While a complex issue, public health and health care entities continue to seek ways to work with the populations they serve to better address such challenges. METHODS: The PATCH Teen Educator Program, an initiative of the Providers and Teens Communicating for Health (PATCH) Program, promotes open, honest, and medically accurate conversations between health care professionals and adolescents via youth-led workshops for both clinicians and adolescents. RESULTS: Across 6 program sites, workshop participants noted positive changes towards enhancing patient-clinician communication. Youth facilitators also reported notable changes related to workforce and youth development after their 9-month commitment to the program. DISCUSSION: These results showcase promising effects of the youth-driven initiative on enhancing local adolescent patient-clinician communication, as well as effects on engaged youth.

Teaching Adolescents to Manage Their Own Health Care.

Many factors impact an adolescent's willingness to appropriately use health-care services and intent to begin the health-care transition process. Published literature continues to show that the way adolescents experience and utilize health-care services is ineffective and has long-term impacts on individuals and systems. Building upon the success of an existing peer-to-peer workshop, a Toolkit was created to provide school-based health professionals the information and resources needed to deliver pertinent information to high school students in one lesson. Of 416 students, over two thirds reported that they plan to be more involved in their health care (69.8%), advocate for themselves in health-care settings (68.0%), talk openly and honestly with health-care providers (71.9%), and learn more about managing their own health care (68.6%). Integrating this information into existing health curricula provided a broader reach with minimal work and promising results that could improve overall health-care transition efforts.