An evaluation of the National Health Service [NHS] England Youth Forum

More than five decades ago the Platt Report (Ministry of Health, 1959) recommended that hospitalised children needed to be treated differently to adults. It took until the 1980s for evidence to emerge that healthcare staff were beginning to implement Platt’s recommendations; Davies (2010) attributes this long awaited change of approach to a new generation of practitioners and a renewed focus from the Government that acknowledged the distinct needs of children and young people. In the early 1990s James and Prout (1990) produced work to suggest that children should not be viewed as passive recipients of care but should be recognised as having their own voice, referred to as the “emergence of children’s voice” (Hallett and Prout, 2003: 1)