Your Voice, Your Thoughts, Your Actions!
Improving Child Health Through Research.
What is a Young Persons’ Advisory Group?
A Young Persons’ Advisory Group (YPAG) helps researchers, doctors, and their teams with their research projects and clinical trials. The group actively participate as research partners, giving advice to researchers and their teams on different aspects of the research project.
If you’re already convinced, check out our application form here.
Keep reading for more information about the YPAG!
A YPAG is made up of children and young people who have a variety of different experiences and skills. Some may have experience of being in hospital or may have been part of a clinical trial or may have had a sibling or a friend in hospital, and others may have a great interest in science, medicine, and research. All are encouraged to be part of a YPAG!
This YPAG will be made up of approximately 40 young people between the ages of 12 and 18 living in Ireland. You may remain in the group up until you turn 19 years of age. However, you may leave the group whenever you wish. This group is open to all young people regardless of if you have a childhood disease or not. Our aim is to achieve to the best of our ability an equal balance of gender and age as well as sufficient representation across diagnosis, geographic location, ethnicity, and socio-demographic background.
What does a Young Persons’ Advisory Group do?
Children and young people are not just small adults – you have distinct physiological, developmental, and psychological characteristics. You deserve and must have the same access to high quality, evidence-based (from paediatric studies) health care as adults. To ensure that child health clinical research across Ireland is driven by your voice, the young person, this YPAG has been established. The aim of this YPAG is to ensure that research is relevant, responsive, and meets the needs of the young people affected.
You will be asked to attend a short online meeting every couple weeks (4-6 weeks) and a longer in person meeting on a Saturday 5/6 times a year. The in-person meetings will be held in different parts of the country. We will give you plenty of notice about these meetings and will help you prepare for them. We will also help you plan how you will get to the meetings. These meetings will be a great opportunity to meet fellow YPAG members, and to meet the researchers you’ll be helping. It won’t all be work though, as we will have plenty of opportunities to have fun! Food will be provided.
The YPAG’s work will differ from study to study but below are some examples of the types of work the YPAG will do:
- Work with researchers to design research projects.
- Develop research questions
- Design information leaflets that are interesting for young people.
- Heal researchers write grants for money for research
- Advise researchers on how best to recruit participants to their clinical trials
- Attend conferences and other meetings representing the YPAG.
- Raise awareness of health research and the work of the YPAG on social media.
- Attend courses and provide training to researchers and healthcare workers on how to incorporate the voice of young people in their work.
- Come up with new research ideas.
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- Help promote the YPAG and clinical research on social media, websites, and through videos.
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We want your membership of the YPAG to be an opportunity to meet new people, contribute to research, and most importantly be a chance for you to have exciting new experiences!
How does our YPAG meet?
Meetings will be held online with in-person meetings held in locations around Ireland.
Online meetings will be an hour long while in person meetings will be 10am-4pm on a Saturday approximately.
Who runs our YPAG?
Our YPAG is a joint, national initiative between In4kids and the Children’s Health Ireland Clinical Research Centre (CHI-CRC). Both groups are funded by the Health Research Board and their goal is to support our YPAG in the design and delivery of child health research in Ireland.
The day-to-day operations and functions of the YPAG are run by our amazing facilitators Shane and Sonia! If you want to find out more about Shane and Sonia, just click on their names below their photos.
Have we convinced you?!
Would you like to join our YPAG?
Follow the link below to our application form
The new national Young Persons’ Advisory Group is a joint initiative between the Children’s Health Ireland Clinical Research Centre (CHI-CRC) and In4Kids, the national paediatric clinical trials network. CHI-CRC and In4Kids are supported by the Health Research Board.