How KBT are working with user involvement for young people

Photo of young people working with KBT

KBT are working with userinvolvement for young people in several ways. Among other things, we have a resource group consisting of committed young people, participates on conferences and we are working on different projects with or about user involvement.

Room for user involvement

Both professionals and young people using health and welfare services often wish to have user involvement. But it can be difficult to know how to best do this. Experience shows that there is not necessarily room to implement the proposals that committed young people come up with. There sometimes are no real possibility for user involvement.

We realised that we need to find space for user involvement. A space where professionals and youth can cooperate and discuss what is possible and needed. Read more about the project Room for user involvement here.

 

Another place

Sometimes the young people we cooperate with not only have a lot of commitment. They also come with proposals. Another place (En ainna plass) are a good example on this. In 2020/2021 we had an one year project in connection with Glimt Recovery Center. "Glimt ung" was a place where young people in Trondheim could hang out 2-3 evenings a week. They had a special focus on beeing a place where people with mental health or substance abuse problems were welcomed. They also focused on people who had experienced loneliness or similar issues.

The project was in many ways a success. But as it was just a one year project, it came to an end after the allotted time. At this time, four of the young boys who often went to "Glimt ung" had joined KBT's resource group with youth. When the doors at Glimt ung closed, they almost immediately felt a miss.

That resultet in a new project, "Another place". User involvement are a huge part of this project. From the project application to the operation, the youth will be involved. Read more about "Another place".

 

My Voice Matters

My voice matters (Min stemme teller) was a development project aiming to develop a method for real user involvement for children and youth as service users.

The project goal was to enable children and youth to bring forward their experiences with the services with their own voice. The project is based on User Interviews User (UIU) as a methodology, where former service users interviewed current users of a service.

In this project, we had young people/young adults in the ages of 18 and 23 as project team members, who themselves have experience with the use of mental healthcare services. These project team members are trained in the UIU-method, and participated in designing the interview guide, conducting interviews, analysis, writing report and presenting the results in the dialogue conference with the service and participants of the projects.

My Voice Matters resulted in 5 reports from 2015 (pilot project) to 2021 (final report).  The project was funded by Stiftelsen Dam through Rådet for psykisk helse.

 

Networks and workgroups

We are also active members of different networks for children and youth in collaboration with municipalities and national competence centers.