Adolescents (10-24 years as defined by 2016 Lancet Commission on adolescent health and wellbeing) are frequently described as a ‘hard-to-reach’ population in obesity prevention research, health services and policy. But this framing risks placing the problem on adolescents themselves, rather than questioning whether the systems designed to support their health and wellbeing are accessible, relevant, and responsive to their lives.
Adolescence is a critical period for establishing lifelong health trajectories, yet adolescents can fall between child- and adult-focused prevention and health services. At the same time, the environments shaping adolescent health have rapidly changed. Adolescents move across physical and digital worlds where social media, food delivery platforms, commercial marketing and algorithmically and AI-curated content increasingly shape how they eat, move, connect and access health information. Research, health services, interventions and policies have not always kept pace.
Drawing on our research in partnership with adolescents, this presentation will ask whether adolescents are difficult to reach, or whether the problem lies in systems largely designed by adults. It will consider how we can design research, prevention, health services and policies that better reflect adolescents’ lives, priorities and the environments they navigate every day.
Examples from our new research using qualitative online surveys, digital health intervention outcomes and the co-creation of Health Hive, a freely accessible online course designed with adolescents to build capacity to participate in public health research, will illustrate alternative approaches. These examples highlight the value of meeting adolescents where they are, designing with rather than for them, building trusted and accessible pathways for participation, and considering the broader social, commercial, and digital environments shaping their health and wellbeing. Reaching adolescents beyond the clinic requires more than finding new ways to bring them into existing systems. It requires us to review how those systems are designed in the first place.