Youth Work 4 Health

This week I went to the Youth Work 4 Health conference held by the National Youth Agency in Brighton. It was an interesting day with a lot of discussion about how you can use the Youth Work 4 Health (YW4H) good practice guidelines within different youth settings.

“Good youth work has always sought to improve the physical and emotional health of young people and many projects are working, directly or indirectly, on health issues. The aim of these Guidelines is to provide a tool to enable individual workers, youth service managers in the public and voluntary sectors, commissioning bodies and partners to assess the quality and effectiveness of this work.”

 

Stemming from the Healthy Schools agenda there has been the realisation that it is hard to apply the Healthy Schools standards to the wide variety of settings found in youth work and that consequently a new set of guidelines are needed. The people attending were from a wide range of backgrounds (Yout Offending Services, Drug and Alcohol Reduction Teams, Voluntary Sector, Housing Associations etc. ) which led to some interesting discussions about how youth services in all their guises often reach young people who are seen as ‘hard to reach’ by other agencies and that because of this how we worked with young people around health was important.

I was particularly interested to see how