Meleat excels during her work experience placement at Healthwatch

Blog - 22 December 2025

We worked with Mencap to provide a training opportunity to a young person and we’ve all benefitted from the collaboration.

Healthwatch staff with volunteer and her support worker

Clockwise from the left: Healthwatch staff Ella, Maria, Alia and Laura, Meleat (work experience placement) and her skills coach Daisy

I've liked using Canva to make social media posts the most.

Meleat Daniel

We were excited when we moved to a new and larger office last year. This was not just because we had more space to support office-based volunteering, but also because we now had room to offer work experience placements to young people with learning disabilities.

The Mencap Training Academy is an Ofsted 'good'-rated provider of supported internship and pre-internship programmes. They work with young people with a learning disability and/or autism. Meleat has joined us each Thursday for the past two months to experience life at a voluntary sector organisation working with the local community to address health inequalities.

Meleat’s work experience role at Healthwatch

As well as being a friendly, helpful colleague who has fitted in well with the rest of the Healthwatch team, Meleat has made some key contributions to a number of our current projects.

Meleat completed a series of training courses in Canva, a user-friendly online graphic design platform. With her newly acquired skills, she created some visually striking social media posts on topics such as cancer awareness, which we can use in the future.

She welcomed participants and helped with the registration at our Challenging Inequality Toolkit event in November. She welcomed participants and helped with the registration. Afterwards she helped us collate the data from the day.

In December, Meleat attended our Women's Health and Wellbeing Workshop focusing on cervical screening and HPV vaccination. The event was hosted by one of our partners, Community Language Support Services. They support residents with limited English and work mainly with black minority ethnic refugee communities. Meleat speaks Tigrinya, and she took some notes during the workshop.

Thank you for all the support you have given Meleat! She has developed her skills and confidence throughout her time with you. We hope to work with you again soon.

Daisy Moynihan, Skills Coach (Supported Internship Programme, Islington), The Royal Mencap Society

Find out more

To learn more about the ways that Mencap works with employers to create opportunities for young people with learning disabilities and/ or autism, visit their website.

Find out more