Details

Purpose

Sharing experiences of co-creating interventions promoting sleep health of adolescents, by describing how a co-creation approach can be used to develop, implement and evaluate sleep health interventions with adolescents in a school context. As the school context is just one part of the sleep health system, also results will be presented on how participatory methods can be combined with a systems perspective to co-produce a whole systems approach promoting adolescent sleep health. 

Rationale

Inadequate sleep health is a major problem among adolescents with negative effects on mental and physical health. Therefore, effective interventions to improve sleep quantity and quality are needed. Co-creation is a promising approach for intervention development, as it maximizes the involvement of stakeholders by tailoring interventions to their needs. Schools are a setting in which adolescents, school staff and parents can be reached easily. The implementation of school interventions might be most successful if school staff are involved in the co-creation process. However, sleep health must be considered as a complex adaptive system, of which the school setting is only one of the subsystems of the wider sleep health system. To fit future interventions with adolescents' and other stakeholders' needs, taking a participatory approach seems essential.  

Objectives 

Presenters from Belgium and the Netherlands will share experiences of co-creating sleep health interventions.

This symposium aims to 

1. Share how co-creation can help to address the problem of inadequate sleep health among Belgian adolescents. 

2. Share how co-creation can help to successfully implement a sleep health intervention at a Belgian school.

3. Share the application of participatory system dynamics in designing a ‘whole systems approach’ promoting sleep health with Dutch adolescents. 

Summary

Laura Belmon (chair, NL) will introduce the symposium and highlight its rationale and objectives (5 minutes). Lea Delfmann (BE, 15 minutes) reports findings of evaluating the upscaling of a sleep health intervention together with Belgium adolescents and includes adolescents' experiences during this co-creation process. Next, Janneke de Boer (BE, 15 minutes) will zoom in on the role of school staff as implementers of this participatory sleep health intervention in Belgium, including the results from co-creating the implementation plan together with the school staff. Danique Heemskerk (NL, 15 minutes) will share her work on participatory system dynamics in designing a ‘whole systems approach’ promoting sleep health together with Dutch adolescents. Professor Sebastien Chastin (UK/BE, discussant) opens the interactive discussion (25 minutes) and ends with take-home messages (5 minutes).

Speaker