Search:
What influences the choices young people make about their health and wellbeing, and how can we create environments that support them to choose what’s right for them?
In this blog, Senior Public Health Practitioner Alice shares how her work with #BeeWell is helping schools and communities turn insight into action. From improving PSHE education to developing resources on vaping and nutrition, Alice’s work is all about supporting young people to make healthy, safe, and enjoyable choices and making their wellbeing everybody’s business.
Who is Alice, and what is your role in public health?
My name is Alice, and I work in the Public Health team at Hampshire County Council, which has a duty to improve the health of the population and tackle health inequalities. My role as a Senior Public Health Practitioner is focused on children, young people, and families, as well as leading on health in education settings.
Being a practitioner means I have a responsibility, alongside my team, for health improvement, health promotion and protecting the health of the population. My interest in public health grew from working in a school – I got really interested in how relationships, sex, and health education could be improved, and I feel very lucky that this is now part of my job.
Could you give a brief overview of some projects you’re working on related to #BeeWell?
I support the delivery of #BeeWell across Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton – #BeeWell has been active in the area since 2023, empowering schools and partners with data to improve physical and emotional wellbeing. I focus on our partnership working with education colleagues and others and using the results to inform how our public health programmes (such as Hampshire Health in Education) work for education settings.
One project I am excited about is presenting #BeeWell at the Equality and Rights Advocates (EARA) Conference in October. The data has helped us understand more about local inequalities, such as discrimination, and poorer emotional wellbeing in girls and LGBT+ young people.
Can you tell us a little bit more about this work?
As well as #BeeWell, I work on a range of interventions that help and enable children, young people and families make choices that feel healthy, safe and enjoyable. Behaviours and experiences in childhood and adolescence build knowledge, beliefs and skills that can have a lifelong impact on health.
These choices can be shaped by our families, and the environments where we live, play, learn – the focus of my work is trying to make these influences more health-promoting for young people. For example:
How do you work with partners to achieve these goals?
An important part of a public health practitioner’s job is to appraise evidence from a wide range of sources, and develop actions that are effective, acceptable and feasible for their local area. #BeeWell provides great data from secondary schools, which we use alongside other sources to deepen our understanding of young people’s experiences. This process, and the work I’ve listed above, relies on our collaboration with education, health and voluntary and community sector partners.
Let’s make young people’s wellbeing everybody’s business. If you’re a school or partner ready to use data and resources to support healthy, safe choices, connect with #BeeWell today.
