Author: Contra Agency

Our second #CYPMefirst Twitter chat

23rd January 2017

We had our second Twitter chat on November 28th 2016 from 8 – 9 pm and the evening was a great success. The main aim of the twitter chat was to talk about communicating with children and young people with learning disabilities or communication impairments. The team members that took part had a fantastic time and the…

The Sorting Task: A useful tool to tackle challenging communication

22nd December 2016

The Sorting Task: A useful tool to tackle challenging communication   I’m a paediatric physiotherapist working in mental health with children and young people. This job has its challenges. A key aspect of my role is to facilitate and support children and young people to do their own physiotherapy to help them get better. This…

Celebrating Me first

5th October 2016

If anyone has been within an inch of Twitter recently, you’ll have probably been bombarded with tweets from the Me first team and #CYPMefirst.  We’ve not only just had our first, incredibly successful Twitter chat (thank you to everyone who made it such a great conversation!) but we’ve also been shortlisted for three more awards.…

The Value of Goal Setting

31st August 2016

I work in the Me first team as the project coordinator and I am also a freelance medical role player (actor) in various NHS medical education communication training settings for exams and communication skills practice. My experience in medical education (from the perspective of playing a patient) has been quite illuminating. I was surprised to…

Is ‘It Could Be Worse’ really the best we can do?

30th June 2016

Is ‘It Could Be Worse’ really the best we can do? It is one of those phrases that has become commonplace, a saying that anyone who has experienced suffering or disappointment has probably heard countless times. It just rolls of the tongue- “It could be worse”. Becoming complacent about such a seemingly harmless phrase is…

AWARDS – Me first is a double winner

29th April 2016

Me first, the Health Education England (HEE) sponsored project dedicated to improving communication between children, young people and healthcare professionals, took home the double at the recent Patient Experience Network (PEN) National Awards in Birmingham. The PEN awards are the first and only national awards programme that recognises best practice in patient experience in all…

How Me first enhanced TB clinics for CYP

14th March 2016

“All London TB Extended Contact Tracing Team (LTBEx) nurses attended the Me first children and young people centred communication training and it opened our eyes to as to how we could improve our communication with the children that we saw. In our work we would see children and young people of all ages, we would…

National Voices

24th February 2016

WOW community blog drafted by Sarah Best – Visit website The Me first project aims to put children and young people at the centre of the conversations about their health and healthcare. Children and young people say that good communication is more than eye contact or body language. It is about involving them in choices…

Talking About Rights

26th January 2016

Hi, I’m Amy and I have a long term health condition called Vocal Cord Dysfunction. As a young person, I struggled with a lot of the issues tackled in this report – like not being able to achieve at school due to time spent in hospital, feeling the odd one out in PE lessons and…

What is Communication? Such a sepulchral word…..

2nd December 2015

    The given definition of communication is this:  the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium. (Source: Oxford Dictionary of English)   Just words and body language right?  It is something that is natural to us all, we communicate everyday  –  for some of us it is the…