Health & Getting Active Programme
The Health and Personal Care programme enables the young people we work with to be healthy and to be able to make informed choices about their health. The projects delivered at both bases aim to provide Caxton’s members with the same information and access to health services as their non-disabled peers, ensuring their safety.
Caxton Youth Organisation’s Health and Personal Care Programme is designed to address and remedy specific issues affecting young people with disabilities. There is a tendency for organisations, teachers and parents to take a scientific approach to sex and relationships work with young people with disabilities, without recognising that cognitive impairment and physical development can be completely different. As such young people with disabilities generally still have the same urges and still go through puberty as their non-disabled peers do. This creates the need for young people with disabilities to gain an understanding of the boundaries of safe and appropriate behaviour, which Caxton can meet.
As part of this programme Caxton Youth Organisation provides workshops on:
- Relationships and sexual health at the Youth Club four times a year and at our residential base Midge Island twice per year. The outcomes are to have internalised a specific set of behaviours to conduct himself/herself appropriately and responsibly in matters of relationships and sex.
- Personal Hygiene at Midge Island 19 days per year. The outcomes being to understand how to maintain his/her own hygiene and accepts the need to do so.
- Coping with Stress at the Youth Club four times a year and at Midge Island twice a year. The outcome is to be able to acknowledge emotions/frustrations and voice them appropriately.
- Substance misuse awareness at the Youth Club once a year and at Midge Island once a year. The outcome is for them to understand that it is neither legal nor healthy to take non prescription drugs.
- Sports sessions to maintain physical and mental wellbeing.
