STAFF at the Genito-urinary Medicine (GUM) Department (Sexual Health Services) of the Royal Bournemouth Hospital are celebrating having been awarded the ‘You’re Welcome’ accreditation. This accreditation is awarded by the Department of Health to highlight services which are young people friendly.

To achieve this status, the department had to meet a set of criteria, which involved reviewing aspects of the service, while keeping young people in mind.

The criteria included accessibility, environment, training of staff and publicity.

At the beginning of the process, staff used a toolkit to review how their current services met the ‘You’re Welcome’ criteria. From these results, staff were able to identify where changes needed to be made and form an action plan as to how they were going to do this.

Throughout this process, staff have become much more aware of the needs of young people and, as a result, many improvements have been made to the service. For example, to promote the department to young people and make them aware of the services they provide, a leaflet aimed solely at young people was designed. A young person’s panel was used to help decide what information should be on the leaflet and to help design the look of the leaflet.

The environment of the department has been made more welcoming to younger people. For example, a notice board provides young people with key information about the service at the department.

Dr Kate Schroeder, Consultant in Genitourinary Medicine, commented: “Being awarded the ‘You’re Welcome’ accreditation is a fantastic achievement for the GUM Department.

“Staff have worked hard towards this and have enjoyed learning how services can be adapted to meet the needs of young people. We plan to continue to build on these changes and continue to gather the views of young people who use our service to guide us in future developments.

“We hope this recognition will give more young people the confidence to use our service should they need to, and the knowledge that they will find a friendly sexual health service that meets their needs.”