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UK General Election - Our Health Matters 2024

Children & Young People Engagement team
The General Election has prompted children and young people across the UK to identify their child health priorities for candidates and the new UK Government.

This page has youth-led information to share with your groups of children and young people, which will help inspire the candidates to prioritise children and young people's health. It includes guidance, a slide deck and poster - plus a video from RCPCH &Us about our manifesto.
UK General Election 2024 - Icons of candidate, ballot box, speech bubbles, document and megaphone | Background has repeatedicons of person and megaphone |
Contents
Table of contents

What is "Our Health Matters 2024"?

Children and young people have been volunteering on a youth-led project to find out what 11-25 year olds across the UK think is important for the new UK Government to prioritise in order to improve child health. As part of the project, we have looked at ideas from 700 children and young people, identified priorities, written a manifesto statement and created a series of asks of the next Government.

The next stage is Our Health Matters 2024 and is about how to get children, young people, schools, youth groups and hospital youth forums involved to raise their awareness of democracy and the elections.

Resources to use with young people

We believe by exploring such an important subject like child health, it will help young people to understand more about the link between health and politics and might make young people more likely to vote in the future.

We have created resources to help groups to talk about child health and to campaign locally for this to be prioritised. We hope they will help help in your work with young people.

The resources you can download from the bottom of the page:

  • Slide deck for use in sessions  
  • Guidance for workers, including a script for the session, how to use our campaigning tool (iParl) and links to other democracy resources  
  • Two posters created by young people in the Our Health Matters 2024 project group

We also have:

RCPCH &Us Our Health Matters 2024 Manifesto

Seven hundred children and young people told us what they want the new UK Government to prioritise. RCPCH &Us young people reviewed this to create a child health manifesto by children and young people:

Our hope is that the new UK Government will make child health a priority, supporting the rights of every child and young person to be healthy, happy and well. They can do this by:  

  • Funding child health services and increasing training opportunities for child health care professionals 
  • Providing children and young people with better access to the best possible health care 
  • Ensuring that all children and young people get access to healthy free school meals and have access to facilities that support their physical and mental health in schools 
  • Providing access to more preventative services to support the most vulnerable in our society, tackling health inequalities 
  • Supporting us, the future leaders, to have the best possible start in life

    RCPCH &Us asks for the new UK Government

    In addition to manifesto statements, young people created a series of asks that need to be done on a practical level to help children and young people.

    The practical asks of the new UK Government include:

    • Financial support and accessibility: better pay for the child health workforce, funding for more support services for children and young people, improving access to health services   
    • Education and resources: mental health awareness and training in school, work experience in the NHS for young people, disability awareness and training in school, hospital and school system improvements 
    • Climate change: alternative products that don’t damage the climate for everyday medicines, net zero construction in NHS sites 
    • Standard of living: access to healthy food, free school meals, increasing access to food banks for children and young people  

    Watch our short video:

    How you can help

    RCPCH &Us young people need your help to get these messages out there and for the candidates standing for election, to prioritise child health.

    We’ve thought of a few ways you can help, by talking about child health and why Our Health Matters to the people who are voting, by asking people to register to vote so that their vote counts in the election, by sharing our manifesto and asks on social media or with friends and family.  

    For groups you can use our online campaigning tool, iParl, which sends an email to all the candidates in your area to raise the issue of child health and asks them to prioritise this in their campaign and in the new UK Government.

    More in our guidance for workers, slide deck and posters, you can download below.

    How does this align with the RCPCH Manifesto?

    Alongside Our Health Matters 2024, the College has worked with paediatricians to produce the RCPCH Manifesto “support children’s health and wellbeing in a changing world”. This is aimed at political parties and has been used to influence party manifestos ahead of the election setting our priorities for the next UK government. It aligns closely with the themes of Our Health Matters 2024 like health inequalities, climate change and mental health. Like Our Health Matters 2024, the College manifesto wants to ensure child health is a priority for the new government. 

    Thank you for your time!

    Thank you from our young people for your help with using and sharing these resources and raising the need for child health to be a priority for the new UK Government.

    Should you require further information or have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact the RCPCH Children and Young People’s Engagement Team at and_us@rcpch.ac.uk. 

    Thanks to the General Election Our Health Matters 2024 group : Aiden, Aishwarya, Demi, Fiona, Joseph, Leckhna, Maili, Nathaniel, Owen, Pavan, Shreya, Umar and Xai.