Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust (LCH) gained seven new members of its communications team, as students from Leeds West Academy in Rodley spent a day at trust headquarters learning about the role of the team as part of the Children's Commissioner's Takeover Challenge. As part of proceedings, the group blogged about spending the day with LCH.
For the first time ever, Leeds West Academy sent seven children to Stockdale House to have an amazing opportunity, taking over the communication team and, to see how people work behinds the scenes of the NHS.
Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust brought seven children to the work place to explore what happens at in the working world. Many of us were nervous and had different ideas. Some of us thought it would be handing out food and drinks, others thought that we would be shadowing some of the workers and working with the team. However it was different from these ideas.
We arrived at Stockdale House around 9:30am, none of us knew what we were going to do. We were met by our first guide, Chloe, and she brought us to the meeting room and we met by Helen and James. We got involved in observing, reviewing and suggesting changes to real service users leaflets, and documents to help the trust to see how younger people react. We were showered by grapes and cookies and by the end we ate them all!!
After lunch we interviewed four different workers and saw how they got into the kind of jobs. The first co-worker we spoke to was Amanda and she worked in the review department, she spoke to us about how she helps people, she said “it is very rewarding and never the same so it’s never boring.” One of the other co-workers was, Chris was part of the pharmacy department and he sorted out all medication and drug doses going out.
We felt we have made an impact because they presented their ideas and when they were given feedback which helped them a lot, and our points were taken into consideration.
- Jodie, Tyler, Lauren and Beth
Takeover Challenge happens every November and is a national opportunity from the Children's Commissioner for children and young people to 'take over' different aspects of organisations to get involved in making decisions about issues that affect them.
