Leicester City PCT ... Project Dil
Peer Education in Leicester
Project Dil is a health promotion programme looking mostly into primary and secondary prevention, by increasing understanding of Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) in the South Asian community through education and interventions in GP practices.
The aim of peer education is to educate and empower the community, so that there is some commitment from individuals to make lifestyle changes and avoid the disease. Coronary Heart Disease is a condition that is mainly influenced by the lifestyle risk factors, which are modifiable and can make a difference to an individual's health.
In promoting and educating the community, the peer educators have been recruited from communities and have an understanding of community perspectives and their needs. Language has been a key factor in the past where health messages have not been as successful through lack of understanding the language. Hence, the peer educators are from the same ethnic background and language is not an issue in promoting health messages.
A training programme for peer education was developed and accredited through the Open College Network, whereby forty five individuals undertook the training, the group comprised of individuals ages ranging from sixteen to seventy, male and female. Since then the peer educators have continued to work for the community in Eastern Leicester Primary Care Trust and three have gone for further training into cardiac rehabilitation to the South Asian community. They are now employed at the three main hospitals in Leicester and doing a very valuable work for the cardiac patients. There are further plans for other peer educators to train them and enable them to go into areas such as, diabetes, heart failure, renal disease and any other diseases that may be inter-related to CHD.
As the peer education programme has been very successful in Leicester the existing peer educators have now been employed by the PCT whereby initially it was on voluntary basis. These peer educators are supervised and monitored by a Community Health Development Worker, who is also from the ethnic background and works very closely with the peer educators.
It has been identified that there is need to employ more peer educators from other cultural backgrounds as the population in Leicester East is changing dramatically and the whole peer education programme continues to receive local, regional and national recognition and hopes peer education is one of the main ways into primary prevention.
For further information contact Davinder Nagra on 0116 2954123 or email: Danindra.nagra@elpct.nhs.uk