Challenge 3 | The Changing Roles of Citizens in Health
Speakers: Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership | Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University | Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum | Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Welcome. Let’s get started with this challenge session.
I’m the health and care lead at the South London Partnership. I work with the five South London boroughs plus Wandsworth to support them in working together on all things health and care. We work with lots of partners in South West London, particularly the NHS, but also the voluntary sector, universities and wider partners as well. I oversee a big program of work that covers all sorts of things, from digital tech, to workforce, to hospital discharge and anything that is linked to care and overseeing those partnerships.
This session is focusing on the changing roles of citizens in in health, in particular tools and innovations that are used beyond clinical settings and driven by users, communities and individuals. I want us to think about how that role is going to shape and develop into the future and what we what we need to do, both individually and together, to support the development of innovation within that community and individual user context.
We have a lovely panel here who have lots of expertise, knowledge, interest and passion about that particular area to share some insights with us.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
Thank you for inviting me. I’ve got a clinical background as a kidney nurse, and I’ve worked in the area of kidney disease all my career. I’m a professor at London South bank University, I’ve had a clinical role, a teaching role, and also a Research and Quality Improvement role. I’ve also always had a contract in the NHS, most recently at Barts Health working within the East London community kidney service.
About 20 years ago my interest in prevention of kidney disease really took hold, working as a clinician it was all about firefighting and I started to think we should be concentrating on trying to prevent kidney problems. Kidney problems come about partly through management of diabetes and also high blood pressure. Those are the prevention areas that I’m interested in. More laterally, I thought we’re reaching some people with our health education messages, but there’s a whole group of people we’re not managing to reach. For example, people with mental health issues, learning disabilities, and people from different ethnic groups, and we really need to focus on that. Earlier you heard the statistic about the number of people that use the NHS app is around 60%, I’m interested in the other 40%. With Andrew, from the Croydon BME Forum we have developed lots of partnerships, and with voluntary charitable organisations to really try to focus on those underserved groups.
We’ve got two ongoing projects at the university: one involving our student, visitors, and community ambassadors, running events, going into communities and bringing people into the university. The other project is to reach Black communities with a message around blood pressure. Working with the Croydon BME Forum on the barbershop project, to train local barbers to talk to their clients about blood pressure. We are at the stage now where we’re encouraging those people with high blood pressure to seek further help and support.
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
We work with London South Bank University on quite a few projects, but the main two are about partnerships and our short projects as well. On 16th December, we will have been running for 21 years. We’ve now got 30 members of staff. On March 20th, 2020, the day Boris Johnson told us all to stay at home, we had seven members of staff, over the next four years, we really grew. Our income grew from £200,000 to £1.5 million but with that came new challenges, and pressure from the NHS as well, asking us to do more. Before we had to knock on the door of the NHS, now it’s the other way around. They come to us asking to do new projects, we’re happy to do that, and they’re happy to do things that they may never have done before, which is the most important thing.
Nicki and I met just before lockdown, and we wanted to do the barbershop project because it was an innovative project of going into barbershops. Rather than, once again expecting Black men to come to us directly, or go to the GP, we said, let’s go to them, and bring the discussion to the barber shops. What’s the saying? You can change the world with a haircut!
The idea came about because when you get your hair done, you talk with the person who cuts your hair. Take my son as an example, he has been going to the same barber for 15 years. He doesn’t talk to just anyone, he doesn’t trust anyone else to cut his hair, but he’s built up that relationship and that trust with his barber. We thought if we could train up the barbers to actually give that information i.e., high blood pressure, mental health, we can hopefully change some people’s way of doing things.
Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
Hi, I’m Philip, I’m so interested and inspired to hear about the work you’re doing and having a real impact in the communities that you work within.
My background is as a community pharmacist, and I have always seen community pharmacy as being the front door of the NHS. We have always treated illness and it’s starting to evolve to be more about prevention, we have now got case finding services for things like hypertension, for example. People can now come into the pharmacy to have professional checks to see if there are any underlying problems. Having worked as a community pharmacist, I became really interested in the teaching side of the profession and how to help bring the next generation forward. I teach the Master of Pharmacy Course at Kingston University, and there we try to bring an element of new technology into our students’ education through the delivery of quite a novel teaching program which looks at the use of social media to support public health campaigns. The students look within the locality of Kingston, they look at the demographic of the population and think who would use particular types of technology and social media. They also then consider the health issues within the Kingston area and try and engage people through the use of technology. Ultimately, we don’t think technology will replace face to face care, but that it will become an additional way that healthcare professionals can increase their conversation time with the public, away from the physical building of the pharmacy or of the healthcare institute.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
We’ve got a series of questions for our panellists and then we’ll have some discussion collectively after that.
From your experience, what are the most effective ways of engaging communities in shaping and adopting health innovations?
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
I’m an older white woman, now clearly, I’m not always the best person to engage communities and messages so I would say number one is absolutely work with organisations like Andrew’s organisation, and voluntary and community organisations. It’s all about the trust, as we know, people coming to the NHS don’t always have trust in us. The problem is, we’re expecting them to come to us for either primary or secondary care, and we’re expecting them to immediately have trust in us, take the health messages and then use those messages effectively. What I’ve learned is that we’ve got problems all along the line. Number one is to engage with voluntary and charitable organisations. Number two is when you’ve made those links to try and be in people’s shoes. Now, it’s difficult as an older white woman to be in the shoes of a young Black man, so it’s about just trying to understand that really.
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
I’m an older Black man, even so, in my 50s it’s hard for me to engage with people in my community because of age. I would also say it’s about making sure you’re engaging with the right people. For example, if it’s to do with young mental health, then let’s try to train up younger people to go back and deliver that message. I would definitely say, try and work with people around the same age and same demographic.
Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
I’m involved in a lovely project in Lambeth. It’s part of a campaign to engage local people to create businesses that improve the health of the local community. For example, a single mother who has been trained in counselling and mental health support whose focus would be on single mothers who are struggling and finding it difficult to cope with the day to day life challenges. Other projects include somebody who actually makes badges as part of a mindfulness approach, works in a small group to create a badge to improve people’s mental health. You have to really think about the local community, find out what the local people’s interests are and engage with them. Engage with the Black Prince Trust in the local area, they deliver exercise and diet advice programs and try and engage with the people within those organisations and local businesses that act as mentors and supporters for people who want to develop innovative businesses in the area.
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
We’ve started a new project around psychosis within our community with the Maudsley Charity Trust. They came to us as an older charity, asking how to engage with our community. So now we’ve started to engage with the faith sector as well. We engage with all of the pastors and imams in Croydon. We train them up on psychosis or vaccinations and give them that message to take back to their congregation, and it’s working really well. The good thing is that now there’s also money towards the training. Whereas in the past you were asking them to give up their time for free, now they’re actually going to pay someone to come on the training course. These are some of the new things that we’re learning.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
With recognition and learning and evidence that you know the approaches are effective, more people want you and others to do them. That’s great. Thank you.
Next up is about working in partnership. We’ve heard a lot about that this morning, but thinking about how partnerships between public health programs, businesses and academic institutions can be leveraged to drive these community based health initiatives that we’re talking about. It would be good to have your thoughts on that please, starting with Philip.
Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
I think it’s really important that businesses understand that universities are institutions that can help and support them in growing as well.
We identify businesses that may need support to maybe change their product offering or make it better and more impactful. Businesses are perhaps just not aware that within the university, we can help them with research or product development and help them to consider some of the challenges that they’re facing in a different light. I think it’s about helping businesses and the public health sector to recognise that there’s a lot of knowledge and expertise in universities, and if we all work together to reach a common goal, which is ultimately to improve the health and wellbeing of our localities, while also improving business practice and success.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
I absolutely agree. So a couple of things to add. Something I found particularly useful is that public health departments often have very good stats, so they’re able to say very clearly what the problems and challenges are in local areas. Whether it’s mental health, blood pressure or cancer, whatever it might be. Quite often when we’re starting a project, we look at that first, and then we know absolutely that businesses often have solutions. What sometimes happens with businesses, is they might come to the university and say, we’ve got this situation, what can you offer us? Quite often they don’t have access to people with those health conditions, so we can, particularly in my area, lead them to all the charities I have links to. I know people who are living with kidney disease, with high blood pressure, and have you thought about that perspective? It’s all about patient public involvement. We might have these all singing, all dancing, fabulous apps, but if they haven’t been developed with people, then they just fall at the first hurdle.
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
Around partnerships, in Croydon we have something called One Croydon and within that, we have the NHS, Croydon council, the police and the voluntary sector. That has evolved in the last three years so that we are all sitting around the table, and because we all now appreciate how important it is for all of us to work together. Before an NHS hospital could be doing one thing, while Croydon Council will be doing another, and the police will be doing another. Now we actually come together to say, this is the problem, and we’ve come together to fix it. I think that has changed since COVID, because it wasn’t like that before. Before it could have just been the NHS, the police and the council, and the voluntary sector were set apart saying, we can help! Now they really appreciate this partnership. The One Croydon project, which was funded by the National Lottery for three years, is unfortunately finishing in December, but we’re going to continue it because we know, forget about the money, we still need to meet every month to discuss issues within Croydon.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Great, so the next question is around universities and our academic institutions and thinking about how they can help build those collaborations with local communities to develop healthcare innovations. Nicki, that one’s for you.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
It’s always about people, isn’t it? It’s always about being open, like Andrew said, equal partnerships, and everybody valuing everything that people bring to the table. In my experience at the NHS, there can be a terrible hierarchy, and I’m sorry to say that I sometimes see my senior colleagues coming to these events, and they still see themselves as top dog. That isn’t the way to go. It is all about people, and about valuing each other, those collaborations aren’t going to work if you come with your own agenda, if you think you’re important, if you think you’re going to do the best job.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Andrew, in a similar vein but thinking about your type of community organisation, what is it you know that you can do to support the development of that truly community-led innovation?
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
Let’s just talk about the workshop and the stroke projects as well. It’s about trust, when I didn’t know Nicki, I didn’t know it, but we had to trust each other and we had the same heart, right? We knew what the goal was, we wanted to reduce high blood pressure in the community. We didn’t know how we were going to get there directly. Nicki had loads of ideas and I had loads of ideas, we employed some people, and maybe some of those employment didn’t work too well. Let’s see how we’re going to get around it. Let’s apply for new funding, which we’ve done. I would say it’s really about trusting and if we’ve both got that same agenda or that same passion, I think we’re going to get there.
We have to make sure that the university believes in us because there were other organisations you could have gone to. The stroke project, a new project we started about six months ago, it was nice to be approached to do that project, and nice to hear, we want to hear from you, how do you think we should reach the community? So we did some focus groups. One of our buildings is only a minute down the road in the Whitgift Centre. So we said, let’s do it in our building here, but also let’s use some university space as well, because some of our community would like to but never get the chance. Using both buildings helped to really empower the community.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
It’s a really growing area, that’s why we’re talking about it, it’s important. It really makes a difference making sure that these innovations are co-developed with the communities they serve. How are we going to manage that in the future, you could be very popular!
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
I don’t mind that!
I met this young man who I used to go to church with when he was 5 or 6 who I haven’t seen for 15 years. He approached me, and asked if I remember him, of course I didn’t from a 5 year old to a 21 year old, there was a big difference! He came and introduced himself and then he rang me to ask if I would mentor him. I said I will mentor him for the next 12 months and we meet at least once a month. That is where the passion is for me now as a 50 year old, to now start to empower the younger ones. If we can empower this group and get them to take the lead, it’s only going to make all of our lives easier. Let’s empower the young men, the young ladies, and let’s get them doing things because they’re clever enough and that their ideas are so big. That’s my plan.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
Something we’ve learned is the importance of valuing people once they’ve taken part. Andrew was talking about focus groups, it’s not for people to expect money, but you know, a gift voucher or something for taking the time to do that. Feeding back on how the project is going is so important, and what happens at the end of the project? We’re not really very good at that. You might take part in research or quality improvement and then not tell the people who took part what happened, and that’s a huge criticism. We cannot let that happen.
Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
Those are really important points about feedback at the end. You have given your time for this research, what have been the outcomes? What is happening now that’s different than what’s happening before, because of what you have offered and what you’ve done.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Coming to you Philip more specifically to think about your experience around digital public health and pharmaceuticals to improve community health outcomes, a topic that came up this morning about improving digital literacy in our communities. How can that work support that agenda?
Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
We are doing small feasibility studies to see how we can incorporate technology into services that are already available through community pharmacy to enhance the service and to deliver better outcomes. One of the services that we are trying to enhance is the weight loss service. Until now, the weight loss service was a once weekly face to face appointment with the pharmacist, now we want to deliver a once monthly face to face appointment, and for the remainder of the weight loss support to be delivered via social media. We’re using pharmacy support staff to deliver that program with the background support of a pharmacist to ensure that the information they’re sharing and the advice that they’re giving is evidence based and supported by NHS guidance as well. We’re not trying to replace face to face but to enhance it.
Remember that most people don’t come to the physical pharmacy building, they prefer to go to Google, and maybe now they’re going to start to use AI, so what we need to do is use the first point of call to the NHS, which we believe to be the community pharmacy, to better support people and train them in how to use that digital side safely too.
In pharmacies, we have ‘health champions’ who are specially trained to support people to improve their health in specific areas like smoking cessation or weight loss. We want this to evolve to become a health and digital champion, so they’ll also help to improve the digital literacy of the people they are supporting, in order to be signposted to evidence based online advice and support that will ultimately allow them to improve their health away from the disability.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Andrew, thinking a bit about that digital literacy through your work, how do you support the development of that digital literacy in the communities you’re working with? I think we’ve had to acknowledge that not all health innovation is necessarily digital.
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
I don’t think we do too much around digital literacy.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
I would say that we do currently partner with another community organisation. In that sense, volunteers from that organisation come in and they offer support services that actually teach clients how to use the NHS apps or any digital issues that they may be facing.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
I’m sorry to put you on the spot, but you’re obviously reaching into lots of different communities where there are variable levels of digital literacy, and opportunities so it’s good to hear a bit more about those.
Question:
On that particular point, I work for an organisation in Merton with a lot of older people, and you were talking about how older people can’t necessarily relate to younger people. Actually for digital, intergenerational projects work well. Our older service users in our community centre absolutely love having young people, sixth formers from a local school, come in and show them how to use their devices. It’s also a great corporate offer for a local company, for example, we’ve got a local legal firm, and they have about 5 or 6 of their lawyers come in at lunchtime to help our older people use their gadgets. They are really popular sessions. Another thing, as you were saying about partnering, a lot of libraries do a very good digital communication so it’s about going to the right place. We don’t necessarily have to get terribly involved in some of these things.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Some really good examples there, and I suspect some clients are a lot more interested in health, digital tech than perhaps other groups as well.
Follow on from question above
Our older group, just want to learn how to use the tablet or get an app onto their tablet, then that can develop into learning how to use the NHS app.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
So let’s just hold that, because I think that would be a really good topic of discussion for us all to come back to about the use of innovative healthcare technologies in our communities.
Thinking about big questions now. What societal and systemic changes do you think are necessary to ensure that community health initiatives are effective and inclusive?
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
A slight anecdote, about 20 years ago, I started to be interested in self-management, and self-care, something that came out of that was that individuals hear health messages but don’t actually realise the impact looking after yourself has on your health outcome. Not how long you live, but what those last years to your life are like in terms of your life quality. I think people still haven’t quite grasped that, if I walk quickly or if I lose a bit of weight or stop smoking or don’t take drugs, that will impact me in the longer term. I know it’s very difficult because 20 year olds can’t fast forward to see when they’re 50, but I think that message about those last years of life, do you want to be living them with ill health, or do you want to be living them well? That’s something we’ve got to somehow encourage people to think about it.
Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
I think it’s about empowering people to take responsibility for their own health and to be conscious about it. As a society, we need to acknowledge that possibly the NHS is struggling and that if we don’t make a change now, it’ll not be able to cope with the future ill health that we may all experience. Also, as we talked about at the very start, the prevention aspect of it needs to have a bigger focus, and people need to think about how we prevent ill health, rather than how we treat it.
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
I would say training the community to get the message out. We can’t leave it all down to the doctors or to the NHS. We’ve just finished a two year systemic family training practitioner course which started with a cohort of 20, we finished with 15. We thought we would lose loads, but now we’ve got 15 trained counsellors in Croydon that go into families and teach them about mental health etc. Now we’ve got an extra 15 people in the community, so it’s not just been the doctors or the psychologists. Just 2 days ago I heard a good news story from a member of staff who took this training course and has now doubled her wages working in Kingston as a systemic funding practitioner.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Martin, can we hear some examples of your work, and your thoughts on what we should be doing to develop more of this community based innovation, and finally, what we can do together.
Martin Ellis, Digital Information Officer, South West London NHS
Thank you for that panel conversation, it’s been really interesting. In your engagement with citizens, what is it they’re looking for in a future health service? I led on the creation of a data strategy for South West London, and part of that was in looking at what research is happening across southwest London. It’s very sporadic, unlike other parts of London, with highly co-ordinated research. What can we do to promote research better? I can give you access to the data.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
I can only really talk from my understanding of the perceptions of people living with kidney disease, because that’s my area. We still give messages that are too complicated. Having an appointment, whether it’s primary or secondary, care, is not satisfactory because you get 10 minutes, the person isn’t in control of that appointment, and even more so with online or telephone consultations. There needs to be a lot of care over remote consultations, attention needs to be paid to follow up. Why are letters still written to doctors, and GPs and not written to the patient? What is that about? When the letters arrive, they’re completely unintelligible. So often I have to try and interpret letters for my family. The information is too complicated and not person-centred. I could talk about this a lot, but that’s my that’s my number one.
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
We need better access to clear information and timing of research. I think too often organisations might say, we’ve got all of this information but nobody’s coming to us. It’s because nobody knows you. It’s so important to get involved with the community and say, we’ve got this, do you want to access it?
I know if you came to my team, we would be more than happy to receive it. So let’s give our community clear information. Access is important as well. One of the things I hear at the moment with late diagnosis, especially with cancer, when I speak to men, they say they didn’t have time to go to the doctors because they were working all the time. This is something we can try and change, can we do late night doctors’ appointments? Maybe from 8pm to 12pm, to fit around the community, rather than expecting people to come in from 9am to 5pm.
Dr Philip Crilly, Associate Professor, Digital Public Health and Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University
I agree with everything that’s already been said. But also, I think personalisation of the information that’s shared with the public. As healthcare professionals, very often, we want to tell people everything we know about a particular subject, but actually people have specific concerns and specific questions that they want answers to. What I think is so exciting about AI, while it’s not quite there yet, with AI, you can ask it a question, and it gives you a further prompt. Do you want to know more information about this? You can then decide, no, that’s not what I’m interested in, I’m actually interested in this. In this way the health advice is focused on what people need and want, rather than what we as healthcare professionals think that we should tell them.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
Absolutely. From a kidney point of view, we’ve developed all this stuff over the years, and quite recently, I had a focus group with people asking what is it you’d like to know? They said, don’t keep telling us what the kidneys do, we’re not interested in that. They want to know how you can live with a kidney problem.
Neil Balmer, Programme Lead, South London listens
South London Listens is a partnership with both those NHS trusts, but also local communities across South London, it’s about using community organising.
One of them evolved from when the pandemic hit, the idea of actually what could impact your mental health. But how would that evolve into an idea to try to tackle the systemic barriers underneath that? This piece of work we’ve been working on for years trying to look at those barriers, is really interesting. When you talk about what citizens want, how do we prioritize those systemic barriers? I can give one example. When we initially asked about what puts pressure on your ability to thrive in communities across South London, the things that came back were work, wages, and one of the biggest issues is housing.
We’re doing a piece of work bringing together NHS local authority leaders in a coalition in health and housing. One of the specific areas that’s come from the community is that people who go into temporary accommodation, which is a massive local issue have no access to Wi-Fi. If you’re expecting healthcare messages to reach these people, they’re not going to. We are now successfully working with Lewisham and Greenwich, to have free Wi-Fi access in temporary accommodation. We’re putting in an ask in for all local authorities as part of that. That’s one example, but more importantly, how do we prioritize that?
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
Are we doing that in Croydon?
Neil Balmer, Programme Lead, South London Listens
Yes, the ask hasn’t been put in yet. We’ve got two representatives from the NHS and local authorities coming from Croydon for a meeting, and we can loop you into that.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
That’s very much in the context of a lot of the innovation we’re talking about is digitally led innovation. It requires that Wi-Fi infrastructure, particularly, the people who are least able to access it based on the types of communities you’re talking about. This sounds like a really helpful area of focus.
Lisa Barrett, Health Science, Social Care and Education, Kingston University
Just an area of personal interest. The work you’re doing on the barber shops Nicki and Andrew is interesting, but I’m interested in what is it that females are more impacted by health wise? What female led projects are happening, particularly, for females who don’t speak English, or don’t leave the house very much?
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
We are working on menopause. Most of my staff are reaching that age and they’ve been asking for that to help research mental health. Is there more that we can do? Yes there is! We are working on cervical cancer, all the cancers, breast, lung, cervical and skin cancer. Can we do more? Yes, we can.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
That prompted me to think, how good are we at sharing those ideas between one another? Whether it’s the barber shop or community based projects for women, do we need to share more information on what works, acknowledging that it will need to be adapted for a particular context and community. I don’t think we’ve necessarily got those mechanisms of sharing working properly even, for example, within Croydon, let alone across South London. Perhaps we need to think a bit more about how you find out what the community down the road is doing. And how do we help move that from one community to another?
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
Can I just add, what I’ve tried to do is also start to recruit more people from a diverse background and by doing that, they’re bringing their culture into our organisation as well. Because there’s certain things that I’ve thought about, if you’re from an Asian background they have brought in their ideas. There’s still more to do with regard to asylum seekers, we’re doing projects around that now, and they’re coming with loads of different issues, which we never even thought about.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
There’s a similar barbershop project for hairdressers and nail salon personnel, and I think it’s run by King’s and Guys and St Thomas. I think they are in their second year, and they’ve got a huge NIHR grant to do that.
Question:
We’re setting up a new community driven service organisation, it’s been in the brewing for about 10 years. It came about through our own experience of having to look after our non-English speaking parents, and we’ve done some work with people on our street who needed help. I’m interested in your journey Andrew. Can we speak over the next couple of days? We’re going for a grant at the moment, working with Martin Ellis at Kingston University and others. I’m interested to know about how you launched the BME Forum? I’ve also got questions about dealing with confidential information. Our staff will be trained to go into the community, but they will also be accessing personal information. Our plan is to create a care concierge, a community help desk to take on administrative activity that will help the patient and the primary caregiver navigate and coordinate care. Whether it’s NHS Primary Care, physiotherapist, podiatrist, or in social care setting, we want to continue it all the way into care in the home or rest homes, etc.
The sole purpose is an administrative desk to speed up communications and create a central repository for the patient and the primary caregiver. For example, if I’m helping my neighbour, I can still go to work and manage their health care. Part of the plan, which I call catch and release, is to get people to work on the care concierge desk for six to eighteen months, and then let them go. With that they will go back to their communities and neighbourhoods and help neighbours, families and friends navigate and coordinate care.
Andrew, could you describe very briefly from the idea, to how you formed the organisation and those relationships?
Andrew Brown, CEO, Croydon BME Forum
The relationships have come from just going to events like this and advertising and knocking on doors. Once you’ve proven yourself and people get to know your work as well. I’m not sure how we met again Nicki, but it was working together on something and then evolving from there.
I think the problem that you’re having is about data, and GDPR. We work with the NHS on many kinds of projects, but we need to have the NHS as a partner because we need to access people’s data. For example, on the barbershop project we keep the data within us, but if you now want to start sharing that data with people, or you want to have the latest information, that’s when you need something called a DIPA. It’s a lot of work, 50 or so different documents and we do that every single year to prove our worth, but that’s the kind of problems you will face. You might have to partner with the NHS to have that data. If you’re working with another organisation, that’s when you’ll have a problem.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
This is a big conversation. It is illustrative of a wider, systemic issue when building up grassroots type of activity it needs that wider system support. Funding is also a big challenge.
Martin Ellis, Digital Information Officer, South West London NHS
I’m afraid I haven’t got the answer on funding! The big national pushes around integrate enable team is about everyone in that little community coming together to navigate around the system. Similarly with the care concierge, it is about supporting modern people in a neighbourhood context and there will be some investment in that because that forms part of the Ten Year Plan.
Professor Nicki Thomas, Professor, London South Bank University
I can mention some funding that often people are not aware of. Knowledge Transfer partnerships, funded by Innovate UK, less available to the public sector because they need to focus on business, but they fund up to two thirds of the cost of a large scale project for a charity. For example, it’s to work with a university expert on a strategic project that takes the organisation to a different level, so it’s much more than a consultancy. You have a full time member of staff placed within the organisation and funded through them, so they’re really worth looking into, and they have a very high success rate.
Sarah Dawson, Deputy of Health and Wellbeing, Enable
Enable is a leisure and culture charity and we deliver various different projects mainly across Wandsworth. This particular topic is very interesting because we have a project called Wellbeing First, which is an estate based project in the estates in the Battersea area. The team are working with groups to understand the type of physical activity they want on the estate, and then delivering it in those locations, and training young people to become physical activity instructors to then take ownership of it.
We’ve done the pilot, and the impact report has shown it’s been very successful, but funding is the issue, we’ve got these really impactful projects and we bring in the sustainability piece, and you can do so much to try and make it sustainable, but actually we want to share that and expand that into all the other estate based services that we could do in across south London. Without that funding we can’t get the expertise to deliver the estate based services and scale that type of service. That’s the crucial element because you can see the impact it has, and when that service is then taken away from the community, its damaging because they don’t have that continued support and trust.
Martin Ellis, Digital Information Officer, South West London NHS
Collaboration is an absolute gamechanger, Andrew, you said you and Nicki both have the same heart, didn’t you? If people believe that same common goal, then you just go forward as a group rather than as an individual.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
Those collaborations we’ve got here today communities, NHS, local government, business and universities and it’s all in those collaborations.
Does anyone who hasn’t spoken want to say anything?
Cherly Taylor, Integrated Wellbeing Advisor, LSBU
I work here at LSBU, I’m responsible for student wellbeing here in Croydon, my question is about the children. There’s been a lot of talk today about adults and what we’re doing for adults. I’m just wondering what are we doing to try and ensure that our children are healthy? Because if we can get them young, then we’ll have healthy adults.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
A really, really important one, it’s one that we’ve all just got to keep saying, don’t forget children, young people and babies, they’re absolutely critical. Thank you for that reminder.
Martin Ellis, Digital Information Officer, South West London NHS
I feel very sympathetic about funding, because it’s the same for digital innovations, you can try something out but without the ongoing funding it falls flat. We’ve got to work out how to move funding around the system, because if that has an impact, why can’t we take money away from somewhere else to keep it going? As a system, we have to get better at doing that because I think there’s huge value in the voluntary sector.
Samantha Mason, Health and Care Programme Lead, South London Partnership
We’ve heard today just how important that work is and the great impact it can have, and we do need to develop, support and sustain it.
I encourage you all to respond to the NHS Ten Year Plan engagement exercise, there’s a portal where you can put all your thoughts in and those issues around funding are really important.
I do need to end the session now and I want to say thank you very much to all of you, and in particular, to our panel.
