I’m a Healthy Minds apprentice and I am writing about my own experience working with evidence synthesis.  

Me and the rest of the Healthy Minds apprentices have been working with Ruth and Rachel with Y-MHESH (“Youth Mental Health Evidence Synthesis Hub”) and looking at different ways we can help them to improve things such as resources that are tailored to young people in order to engage them. These resources include animations for a variety of topics, and with these as a group we were able to watch these videos and look at the things we liked about them. We feel it is important to give the good points about things, rather than providing a lot of negative opinions, as it is more effective to give a variety of positive and negative feedback. We also looked at things we would do in order to fully engage the young people in important videos, this is because as young people ourselves we are able to look at it from a young person’s perspective and what we think would work better.

As well as reviewing animations, we have also had the opportunity to review a range of voice overs that could be used for various animations. With this we were able to think about what would keep young people’s focus while watching these videos, as everything within a video is important and plays an important part in ensuring that young people are fully engaged and that they are able to retain the information they are given.  

As Healthy Minds apprentices we also had the opportunity to help film a video for Y-MHESH (shown below), which is the Youth Mental Health Evidence Synthesis Hub and with this we all spoke about what Y-MHESH was, how working with Y-MHESH benefits us as young people. We were also able to talk about why it is important to work with Y-MHESH. Doing this was important, because having young people giving the information and our own views and opinions about important topics will help to engage other young people in the video and it may give them more encouragement to be involved in something as important as this.