c4c held the first workshop on Young Persons Advocacy Groups (YPAG) for the PPI liaisons in the National Hubs on the 28 January and 4 February held over ZOOM virtual meeting platform.
In case you are not familiar with this term, A Young Persons Advisory Group (YPAG) is a group made up of children and young people actively participating as partners, advising researchers and their teams on a full range of activities in various clinical research projects and initiatives. This workshop was part of one of the tasks of the PPI team of the conect4children project, that is helping to setup different YPAGS in centres /countries that are part of c4c network.
This two-day workshop was initially planned as a face to face meeting in March 2020 to provide information and practical workshops that would support the PPI liaisons in either setting up a YPAG or in supporting another member of staff in doing so.
However due to the restrictions for travel under the Covid 19 pandemic this was changed to a virtual workshop, run over two consecutive weeks and designed as an online workshop to be as interactive as possible.
There were 14 participants, 4 speakers and two coordinators, all from c4c and representing 15 member countries. The workshop was held in the style of a YPAG meeting with a mix of presentations, interactive workshops, breakout group activities and semi-structured discussions.
The aim of the event was to help the PPI leads of the different national network of centres that are part of c4c, to setup a YPAG:
The agenda of the event included the following topics-
- The Meaningful Involvement of Children and Young People,
- The Role of Icebreakers in YPAG meetings,
- Getting the Foundations Right,
- Developing Interactive Learning Tools,
- Running a YPAG- the essentials and Online Resources.
The workshop was a resounding success with very positive feedback provided by the participants.
