Young Scot and SAMH are working in partnership to deliver a 15 month Youth Commission on Mental Health Services. As Project Officer I will support Young Scot and SAMH with the Youth Commission and facilitate their work over the 15 month period, supporting them to gather evidence, encourage debate and develop a set of solutions and recommendations from young people to the Scottish Government and other service providers. I will also look at how child and adolescent mental health services can be developed and improved for young people in Scotland both now and in the future.

MEND is a healthy lifestyle programme for 7 to 13-year-olds who are above a healthy weight. It involves two x1 or 2-hour sessions every week for ten weeks. This is a family programme, developed by experts. Parents and carers join their children in each session to learn about how to choose healthier foods and spend more time being active.

Communication is an essential part of the process of healthcare, but often a patient is under a tremendous amount of stress during this time and will find it difficult to retain the majority of information they are being told. In the context of the diagnosis and the treatment of cancer, this problem is even more exasperated.Booklets can be an excellent source of information, but given the subject matter it can be difficult for a patient to engage with the material in the first place, and when they do, they rarely read the entire thing. Our challenge is to look at the Chemotherapy: A Guide for Patients and their Carers booklet and re-evaluate the material and the way that material is used to then produce a better way of communicating that information to those who require it.