Advancing Equality, Diversity & Inclusion in GMMH: An interview with Yasmin Holgeth, our Equality & Diversity Champion for buzz Manchester Health & Wellbeing Service
We are pleased to share our latest Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) blog, an interview with our colleague, Yasmin Holgeth, Age Friendly Neighbourhood Health Worker for buzz Manchester Health & Wellbeing Service and Equality & Diversity Champion for the service. You can keep up to date with the latest news from buzz by following our Twitter account @buzzmanc.
Tell us a bit about your role as an Age Friendly Neighbourhood Health Worker for buzz?
My role involves working across the central Manchester neighbourhoods, using a co-design approach to develop age friendly neighbourhoods, where people can live and age well.
This role is very varied and involves working with residents to set up community projects such as ‘Write Up Your Street,’ an intergenerational postcard writing project which the buzz Age Friendly and Start Well, Develop Well teams delivered during the pandemic. You can read more about ‘Write Up Your Street’ here.
I also support age friendly networks, which are a place for older residents and professionals to share information and work together at a neighbourhood level, and most recently I have been involved in the installation of age friendly benches to create accessible routes for residents to mobilise themselves around where they live.
How did you become an Equality & Diversity Champion?
When I started my role in September 2019, our Operational Manager Aron Moss discussed opportunities that the service had available for team members to be involved in alongside our current roles.
Once I heard about the Equality & Diversity Champion role, I put myself forward for this position straight away. I thought this was the perfect opportunity for me, as throughout my career, I have always championed equality in roles within the voluntary and community sector and I was excited to do so within GMMH as well.
I was thrilled to be appointed Equality & Diversity Champion for buzz in November 2019.
Why is being an Equality & Diversity Champion important to you?
As a mixed race, Pakistani British woman growing up with an aunty, who during her life had a physical disability which she needed 24-hour care for, I understand some of the challenges and barriers people can face when trying to access services that work for them.
For us to achieve the shared vision and values that GMMH aspire to, we need to start with a strong baseline of knowledge around equality and diversity and to consider how we can support the needs of all of our service users. The more we know about the people we work with, the more we can develop to meet the needs of our service users and we can start to genuinely provide an offer that is patient centred.
Because of this, as part of my role as Equality & Diversity Champion, I have been working to identify training needs for my colleagues around Equality and Diversity and have responded by booking in ‘experts from the field’ to deliver training sessions to improve our teams’ knowledge and ability to work inclusively with residents.
What support and advice would you offer to our staff who are carers, or may feel that they fall into a group that doesn’t have wide representation?
If you are reading this and you are an unwaged carer for a relative, partner or friend across Greater Manchester, we have some fantastic support services where you can talk about your needs with people who can offer you advice and support such as the Carers Manchester Organisation. GMMH also has its own dedicated Trust carer lead (as well as local carer leads and carer champions) who help to ensure that our ‘Carers, Family and Friends Strategy’ is working for carers within the organisation. For more information about the support available to you, please you speak to your line manager or contact serviceusersandcarers@gmmh.nhs.uk.
Due to having my own life-long condition, I am a member of the GMMH Disability Network. There are several staff support networks which have been established for under-represented and disadvantaged groups and individuals within the organisation. From my experience with the Disability Network, attending network events helps you to feel supported and connected with others who can relate to your situation, they are also a place where your views can help to influence change within the organisation.
You can also watch our video and find out more about all of our Staff Support Networks here.
Not one person is the same, and this uniqueness is a gift, but it also means that nobody knows quite what it’s like to be you. It is important to find places where you can speak openly and honestly as the more people know about your situation, the more they are able to give you the support you need to do your job and live your life to the fullest.
Please can you tell us a bit more about your ‘experts from the field’ training courses for your colleagues at buzz Manchester Health & Wellbeing Service?
I started my role as the Equality and Diversity Champion by initially mapping out the work that my colleagues had already done to reach out to service users with protected characteristics highlighted in the Equality Act 2010.
The progress of organising these training courses was put on hold at the start of 2020. When we were 10 months into the pandemic, I had a conversation with Rick Plant, our Community Development Manager, and with his support decided to find a way to deliver this online. We need to do this as the past 10 months had only highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities within these communities, so we needed to take action and improve our knowledge base to break down barriers and improve the way we can deliver the best outcomes and best care every day to our communities.
I reached out to our 40+ staff members to find out if they had any groups that they wanted to find out more about, as I believe that if there is interest in the team to learn and support these communities, this will only fuel their interest further. I was overwhelmed with the positive interest and support from my colleagues about being involved in these courses. Colleagues who didn’t necessarily work directly with our service users, realised that this actually wasn’t the reality and most of our team speak with service users at some point during their day, so they all wanted to ensure they were being inclusive by doing this in the best way they can.
I approached voluntary community organisations who work directly with service users to see if they had any training offers available for our team. Many charity and community organisations have a mission statement to raise awareness about the particular community they serve, so we found this to be a perfect collaboration. With the support of management, we were also able to use some of our staff development budget to fund some of the training sessions when it created additional work for the charities we approached.
Please can you tell us some examples of the ‘expert from the field’ training courses that you coordinated for your colleagues?
We have collaborated with 7 different charity and community organisations based both nationally and in Greater Manchester to create training sessions and raise awareness about groups and communities with protected characteristics that we support as a service.
We ran each course over several days so my colleagues would be able to find a time and date to suit their diary and other commitments.
Find out more about each of our ‘expert from the field’ training sessions below:
Sight Loss Awareness with Henshaws in Manchester
This training session covered ways to engage with and support the needs of people living with sight loss.
Hearing Loss Awareness with Royal National Institute for Deaf People
We explored how to take action to help to improve the lives of people with hearing loss.
LGBTQ+ Inclusion Training with LGBT Foundation
- Session 1 - LGBT 101: Terminology, legislation and inequalities
- Session 2 - Trans and Non-binary inclusion
- Session 3 - Asking LGBT inclusive questions and having challenging conversations
Learning Disability Inclusion Training with Manchester People First
During this training course, we looked at the topics below:
- Key terminology to use when communicating about learning disabilities
- Barriers for people with learning disabilities (technology, environmental and more)
- What is easy read and what does it look like?
- What other support is there available in Manchester for people with learning disabilities?
Being Carer Friendly with Manchester Carers Forum
During this training course, we looked at the topics below:
- Understanding the different experiences and barriers that carers face when accessing health and social care services
- Exploring tools and approaches for positive engagement with carers (including language)
- Any recent changes in support and legislation around carers which may be relevant for us to know about
- Increasing knowledge of how to signpost carers to support services
Anti-discrimination and Community Cohesion with We Stand Together
During this session we covered the topics of anti-discrimination, difficult dialogues, and improving community cohesion.
Involving people with convictions and at multiple disadvantage with Back on Track
This training session covered the topics below:
- Understanding the different experiences and barriers that people face
- Understanding the wider criminal justice and statutory systems
- Exploring tools and approaches for positive engagement (including language)
- Increasing knowledge of different services and sources of information (signposting)
Expect Respect with Womens Aid
This training session helped to explain the ways to improve language to educate women on healthy intimate partner relations.
Going forward, our team has already started to implement changes because of these training courses. Team members have fed back that they now feel more confident when discussing inequalities faced by protected characteristic groups and have pledged to take their knowledge into the work that they deliver, proactively looking to provide services that meet the needs of all of our communities.
Read our previous blog post here: GMMH’s Vision and Actions for advancing equality, diversity and inclusion in our Trust
You can also read about GMMH’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy here.
