A group of young people have been carefully selected from across Yorkshire to join a newly established group which will help shape the use of patient data.
The Yorkshire and Humber Secure Data Environment (SDE) recently finalised its recruitment process to set up a new Young Persons’ Advisory Group. This is part of the SDE’s ongoing commitment to engage and involve the public in how the NHS uses personal health and care data.
The first cohort of around 10 young people, aged between 16 and 24, has been recruited out of a total of 36 applicants from across Yorkshire. The SDE says the group will offer young people new skills, a better understanding of the research environment, and involve them in shaping its decisions.
Applications for membership of the group closed on 7 June and a shortlist was drawn up using a robust scoring system.
Grace Mullins, Yorkshire and Humber Secure Data Environment PPPIE and Communications Lead, said: “Thank you to everyone who applied to join our brand-new Young People’s Advisory Group. Their experiences, ideas and opinions will mean decisions made by the SDE will better reflect the lives of young people and their communities.
“The team worked hard to go through all the applications and select the final members. We used a scoring system to make sure we had a good representative group from around the region, before inviting them in for an informal chat. Although we had a high number of applicants from West Yorkshire, compared to other Yorkshire areas, we looked at sub regions and considered a number of other factors, such as age, ethnicity and gender, before posing a number of carefully chosen questions to each interviewee.
Alexis Mills from Huddersfield said: “I am excited for the challenge of trying to understand, scrutinise, and evaluate this complex data and research proposals so that I am able to present this in a way that is accessible to the public, namely the young people who provide this data, and ensure their privacy is protected.”
For information on the SDE’s new group, please get in touch with jennie.ellul@bthft.nhs.uk.