Healthy Lives, Healthy Living event

This event aims to bring together a number of FE Colleges, Universities and Employers to showcase the education, training and employment opportunities that are available to young people in the West Midlands that can lead them into a career in health care.

The event builds on the success of two previous events, “Blood Guts and Gore: the journey through life” that ran during the British Science Festival in 2010 and “Healthy Lives, Healthy People” that ran for just year 8 students in 2011. These 2 events were extremely successful in engaging young people with a variety of backgrounds and interests, and showing them, in a “hands-on” way, the possibilities that exist locally for them. Positive feedback was received last year from teachers, students and exhibitors and a number of requests have been received to repeat the events in future.

This year around 250 year 8 and year 12 students came to the ‘Healthy Lives, Healthy Living’ event and they had the opportunity to visit a variety of exhibition stands from FE Colleges, Universities and Employers to find out more about careers in health professions and leading healthy lives.  There were plenty of activities and experiments in which pupils participated including some based on audiology, optometry, microbiology and the opportunity to make tablets in pharmacy.

In addition to this, a certificate was presented to staff and students from Arthur Terry School for their participation in a Microbiology Roadshow at their school last September.

Words by Julia Brown
31 July 2012