Adolescent Health Gateway
The Minnesota Partnership for Adolescent Health
Access to high-quality, youth-friendly health care and information
Go to: Essential Themes and Priority Areas
Young people benefit from access to high-quality medical, dental and mental health services and health information. They also benefit from health care providers who understand adolescent and young adult health and development. Young people prefer health services that are youth-friendly, culturally competent, affordable, convenient, confidential, and medically accurate. Health care that is youth-centered, involves parents and caregivers, and allows for increase autonomy, is critical.
The Minnesota Partnership for Adolescent and Young Adult Health believes youth-centered health care is essential to meeting the mental and physical health needs of young people. Young people also deserve to have access to medically accurate health information and guidance on how to care for themselves through adolescenthood and into young adulthood.
Physical and Mental Health
Improve the responsiveness of health care for young people.
Youth-centered care is needed to truly meet the health care needs of young people. The goal of this priority is to strengthen the health care system to better meet the mental and physical health needs of young people. The action steps focus on access to services, increasing the capacity of health care providers to effectively address adolescent health needs, and providing services confidentially while balancing the need to reach out to parents and caregivers to young people.
Action Steps
- Expand and strengthen youth-focused clinics including increasing the number of School-Based Health Clinics (SBHCs)
- Promote teen-centered health care (youth-friendly care)
- Increase focus on mental wellness
- Increase access to school and community-based health services and supports
- Ensure confidentiality in health care for adolescents and young adults
- Enroll adolescents and young adults in health insurance
Minnesota Responses and Resources
Minnesota School Based Health Alliance
School-based health clinics offer students equitable access to integrated health care that supports their learning. The Alliance serves as a hub for information, resources, and support for school-based health services in Minnesota. Services that they provide include advocacy, technical assistance, and opportunities, for school-based health centers located across Minnesota to learn and share together. It also provides guidance and support for communities that are interested in bringing health services into their schools. Learn more at MN School Based Health Alliance
- Psychiatric Assistance Line (PAL)
- Reimagine Black Youth Mental Health
- Youth Health | Youth First
- Whittier Clinic Aqui Para Ti / Here for You - Hennepin Healthcare
- Better Together Hennepin | Hennepin County
- Myself MyHealth
- Family Planning - MN Department of Health
- Child and Teen Check-Up Program - MN Department of Health
National Resources
- Adolescent Health | HHS Office of Population Affairs
- Youth Mental Health — Current Priorities of the U.S. Surgeon General
- Gun Safety and Injury Prevention: American Academy of Pediatrics
- Sleep for Teenagers | Sleep Foundation
Health Literacy
Ensure young people are provided with and have the tools to seek accurate and age-appropriate health information.
Adolescence offers a unique time for young people to health literacy skills due to emerging autonomy, a need for confidentiality, and increasing interactions with technology. Health literacy for young people emphasizes how to use health information rather than just understand it. The goal of this priority is to provide young people with the skills to seek accurate and age-appropriate health information which will allow them to make well-informed decisions about their lives. The action steps focus on the delivery of health information, health education standards, and how young people may access and interact with that information.
Action Steps
- Direct young people to trusted websites and social media platforms where young people, parents and caregivers, and youth-serving professionals can validate and fact-check health-related information
- Promote evidence-informed healthy youth development programs
- Teach young people how to access and use the health care system
- Develop easily accessed life skills resources for young adults transitioning to adulthood
- Teach young people how to find medically accurate information in a digital environment
- Advocate for state-wide comprehensive sex education standards and implementation
Minnesota Responses and Resources
Independent School District #840
This program provides medically accurate health education to middle school students ages 10-14 in a rural Minnesota county with some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state. They implement two evidence-based curricula that focus on healthy decision-making skills, empowerment, relationship building, and medically accurate health information.
- Youth coordinators and health educators are in three different schools
- Reach youth in a county with some of the highest rates of teen pregnancies in Minnesota.
- Empower youth to make decisions that are healthy for themselves and support their future goals.
- The youth coordinators also encourage participants to be a part of the larger community through other youth development efforts.
- Other opportunities for youth include participation on an active youth council and volunteering to be a juror on Teen Council.
- Teen Council provides non-violent youth offenders an alternative to appearing before a district court judge.
Learn more about the youth development efforts at Watonwan County Youth Development
- Sexual Health Education (SELF) | Lutheran Social Service of MN
- Mad Hatter Wellness
- Transition Toolkit - Family Voices of Minnesota
- Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP)
- Minnesota's Healthy Teen Initiatives - MN Department of Health