Building Community Capacity Health Visiting project

With a renewed commitment to fulfilling the 'community level' aspect of the role, Rebekah Besford and Amy Prytherch, two student health visitors, explain their part in a pilot project to embrace 'Building Community Capacity' within our health visiting service. 

We are two student health visitors coming to the end of our training and have been chosen to play an integral role in Building Community Capacity within two local projects in South Leeds.

Health visitors are trained to deliver the Healthy Child Programme. This includes an expectation that health visitors are aware of and actively involved in community development work. This has been a recent challenge for the health visiting profession across the country. With the completion of the Health Visitor Implementation Plan in 2015 and the subsequent increase in numbers of health visitors, there is renewed commitment to fulfilling the ‘Community Level’ aspect of the health visiting role. Leeds Community Healthcare Trust is undertaking a pilot project to embrace ‘Building Community Capacity’ within its health visiting service.

Skinner (2006) defines community capacity building as ‘Activities, resources and support that strengthen the skills, abilities and confidence of people and community groups to take effective action and leading roles in the development of communities.’

Health visitors are seen as bridging and guiding the complex networks of people required to support children, families and communities to achieve the best possible health outcomes.

Working in partnership with ‘Health for All’ based in South Leeds we attend the projects on a weekly basis.  The two projects we are involved with are:

• Happy Chinese Families Group- with the aim of providing an opportunity for local Chinese people to meet and socialise as well and healthy eating and cooking.  This group meets every Monday 9 – 2.30pm at Beeston Village Community Centre.

• Global Families Breakfast Club- with the aim of providing a social meeting space and sharing breakfast cooked and prepared by volunteers form different countries. This group meets every Wednesday 9 - 12 at Beeston Village Community Centre.  

Our role is to play a part in establishing and strengthening the groups. This involves being a part of the volunteer workforce to contribute our knowledge, skills and enthusiasm to help achieve needs led sustainable community development.  This will be done in many different ways including: support with funding applications, contributing to enhancing conversational English, highlighting healthier food options and conversations around responsive parenting.

For the health visiting service the benefits of the pilot are to gain experience in seeing community development/building community capacity in practice and take our learning, reflections and insights back to the service.

We will endeavour to do this through LCH Health visiting facebook page and twitter accounts; feeding back at PIC meetings and writing a final reflective blog on our experience.

You can find out more information on our Early Start Service on our website.

Lights! Camera! Action! CAMHS staff and service users shoot new videos

Staff and service users from our Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) took part in a number of workshops during August at the West Yorkshire Playhouse to create videos for the new CAMHS website.

Below is an email received by the service from the mother of one service user after the workshops sharing her experiences.

 I just wanted to say thank you for the last two days. C.E. has come home glowing both days, but she was on cloud 9 after yesterday! Thanks for telling Annie you were impressed with C.E.. Annie has helped C.E. so much since she took over her case in November and has worked so hard to build her confidence and self-esteem again. She will be so pleased to know how well it went. 

I'm sure you gain so much in your job from seeing young people begin to recover from difficult times & would share my happiness in seeing the change in C.E. since CAMHS took her under their wing just over a year ago. She was a very different girl in a very dark place and she has come such a long way in her recovery. Doing something like this has helped so much with her confidence and self-belief and she is starting to realise she has a lot to offer. I can't tell you how good that makes me feel as her mum because it gives me so much hope for the future.

This is why C.E. wanted to do the project so much. She wanted to thank CAMHS for helping her and is interested in helping other young people. I knew she would enjoy the video project from what Annie had said, but she has absolutely loved it. She has new friends and is going to join the WYP youth theatre in September. Best of all she is happy that she made such a good impression and I know she is proud that she could share her story and experiences. I think that is amazing - such a fantastic example and a great way to break down the stigma of mental illness. I couldn't be prouder of C.E. 

Thank you again for a brilliant project. I wanted you to know how grateful I am. 

Best wishes, Mum of C.E.

Click here to find out more about the work of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). 

Giving a Voice Online

Speech and Language Therapist Julie Carr joined LCH a year ago and is passionate about helping children to achieve their communicative potential. In this blog, Julie talks about how this passion for her profession has lead her to be an example to others. 

I am a speech and language therapist working in the Children’s Speech and Language Therapy department. I have been qualified 4 years and have been working in Leeds Community Healthcare since September 2014. I love working with children and helping them to achieve their communicative potential.

During my final year as a student at Newcastle University, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) launched Giving Voice – a campaign to raise awareness of Speech and Language Therapy and demonstrate SLT's unique value, to local and national decision makers. Passionate about the profession and keen to spread the word about our work I eagerly joined the campaign and became an active participant.

I was involved in raising awareness of Giving Voice in a range of activities including writing to my local MP (Ian Lavery, Wansbeck, Northumberland) to tell him about the importance and value of Speech and Language Therapy. I was delighted when he said he wanted to meet with me to learn more and this was the start of a number of meetings and a long term working relationship with him.

Due to my extensive involvement in Giving Voice over the last 4 years and also my work engaging with a local MP, RCSLT invited me to be a guest speaker at a webinar event in London last month - 'Giving Voice: local heroes make national champions: engaging with MPs'. RCSLT invited me (and two other members) to share best practice examples of positive engagement activities.

I was delighted to be asked to speak at this event and I travelled to London early on Friday morning, keen to share my experiences. I have spoken at a number of events about Speech and Language since qualifying but this was my first experience of speaking at a webinar. Not sure what to expect, I arrived slightly apprehensive but the staff at RCSLT quickly put me at ease as they talked through the running order of the day and explained how the equipment worked.

The webinar was live online at 1pm and RCSLT members began logging on 10 minutes before, ready to engage in the session. Derek Munn, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at RCSLT chaired the meeting and welcomed everyone to the event.  Peter Just, Public Affairs advisor at RCSLT was the first speaker and explained the importance of engaging with MPs and what RCSLT have been doing and plan to do to continue keeping Speech and Language Therapy on the agenda.

Myself and the other two speakers (Rachel Clare, student at UCL, and Janet Cooper SLT manger, Stoke Speaks Out) shared our experiences of raising awareness of Speech and Language Therapy with MPs, to inspire other members to get involved.

I enjoyed taking part in the webinar, meeting the other speakers and hearing about their experiences too. It has reignited my passion for raising awareness of the profession and I hope to continue spreading awareness of the valuable work of SLTs in Leeds also. I am hoping we get schools involved in a national joke telling competition ‘Voice Box’ in the autumn term, which is organised by RCSLT and The Communication Trust.  

If you want to view the webinar, click here.

More details on Giving Voice can be found online.