Start Date:  Dec 2015   End Date:  Jan 2016   Status: Completed

"Youth Health Champions" (YHCs) are young volunteers who provide peer support on health issues within their schools and youth settings. Similar to adult Health Champions, the YHCs  deliver health improvement campaigns and provide opportunistic signposting to health services and resources. The YHCs are normally aged 14+ and supported by an adult co-ordinator, such as a teacher, who mentors the young people in their activities and provides support and encouragement.

The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) has developed an education pathway to support the YHC programmes. The syllabus for the RSPH Level 2 Certificate for Youth Health Champions has three core units providing background knowledge in health and wellbeing, showing the young people how to research local health improvement services and allowing them to practice delivering health and wellbeing messages to groups of peers. The young people are then able to select from optional units to increase their knowledge of specific health improvement issues such as alcohol misuse, physical activity, healthy eating, sexual health, smoking cessation, substance misuse or emotional wellbeing.