539 Reaching out to children and young people about mental health in the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

<h3>Background</h3> Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic the mental health of children and young people across the country has been affected. The ongoing uncertainty during the pandemic has made normality a thing of the past. The burden of this has created an escalation of worsening mental health diagnoses and created a new population with new mental health issues. Children’s mental health week is celebrated every year in the hospital. This year, given the pandemic restrictions, new ways of raising awareness of children’s mental health was sought with using social media outlets. <h3>Objectives</h3> To create content on the hospital trust social media pages that would engage children and young people in children’s mental health week. To use social media to showcase the mental health teams that work in the hospital and the mental health organisations who work in the city who are frequently signposted to from the hospital mental health teams. <h3>Methods</h3> Children’s mental health week runs over seven days and we created content for each day. Firstly, we obtained photos of each mental health team in the hospital and a blurb to introduce themselves and what their job entailed. Secondly, we asked various organisations who are based in our city, whose work revolves around children’s mental health, to provide the same information. Thirdly, and most importantly, we asked the hospital youth involvement group to create questions to ask all the teams involved as we wanted to showcase the voice of the young person in this week. The week also focused on allowing the children and young people who were in patients in the hospital to share their talents and express themselves in ways they manage their mental health. <h3>Results</h3> The performance for each post on each day was analysed and compared to other posts that had happened after this week. Each different post for each day gained a high number of likes, shares and comments. Although one of the comparative posts gained more likes and reactions compared to our week, the post shares were considerable higher for our week overall and the Facebook reach was also higher. The advantage of using social media in this way also highlighted the week to other outlets and the city online paper featured our story on their social media pages. <h3>Conclusions</h3> It was clear that the subject of children’s mental health is an area which still requires highlighting. The comments we received about the content during the week has prompted us to continue with this style, to raise awareness of children’s mental health. The advantages of using social media on this subject enabled us to reach a larger number of young people and their families and carers. The trust social media pages have a large number of followers and to be able to reach so many people on such an important subject made a larger impact than the previous years.