Manchester PCT ... Leadership into Action in Manchester
"Leadership is about taking risks, leading the way, testing things out so other people can learn from the lessons we put in place." Evelyn Asante-Mensah, Chair of Central Manchester PCT and Race for Health.
Evelyn Asante-Mensah discussing health needs with ex-Mayor of Traffod, Whit Stennet.
When it comes to race equality, Central Manchester Primary Care Trust is working hard to effect race equality in the NHS locally, regionally and nationally.
Not only is the Trust's Chair, Evelyn Asante-Mensah, the Chair of the nationwide Race for Health programme, but the organisation is also taking the lead in making equality a priority not only for the Trust but for all public sector bodies in Manchester.
For Evelyn, the motivation to improve services for people from black and ethnic minority communities is not just professional but also very personal. "As a black woman who lives and works in Central Manchester, who has grown up here and has four children in this society, it was important for me personally to take this role," she says. "If you take it back to the personal, it's about me and people like me being able to access appropriate services. It's about people not making assumptions about me and people who look like me. It's also about sending a message to the black and minority ethnic communities and wider society that there are black people in key positions in the NHS who are working to achieve this agenda."
Local leadership
The Trust's commitment to race equality can be seen in every aspect of its work, both locally in central Manchester and in the region as a whole. Locally, senior managers are working hard to instil a sense of equality into the provision of services and the treatment of staff. Meetings held with senior managers to discuss how best to respond to local need resulted in each being given a specific action to carry forward. Last month, the Chief Executive, Sue Assar, held a series of 'road-shows' for staff to explain the importance of Race for Health and how they could help make it a success.
The Trust works hard to ensure that it listens to the views of patients and local people, in particular through its work with the five Local Area Groups (LAGs). Each covers two or three wards in central Manchester and is made up of local residents, frontline staff and local councillors. A board member and a manager from the Trust is involved with each LAG and members of the LAG also attend board meetings at the Trust in an official capacity. These ensure that local views are incorporated into the work of the organisation in a meaningful way.
Regionally
A range of good work has come from this partnership, including the involvement of Longsight and Arwick LAG in the redesign of local maternity services and of Rusholme and Fallowfield LAG in work on recruitment and retention.
Regionally, Central Manchester has played a key role in Agenda 2010, a partnership arrangement between the Trust and the other public sector bodies in the city including Manchester City Council and the city's other primary and acute care Trusts. Though Agenda 2010 was set up four years ago to embed equality concerns into the provision of health and social care, crime and disorder, education and employment, it was widely felt that not enough progress was being made on health.
All that changed when Central Manchester got involved earlier this year. Claudette Webster, Associate Director of Access and Inclusion at the Trust, now chairs Agenda 2010's health and social care theme group which involves nine NHS trusts across Manchester. She says the programme has encouraged local bodies to work together on equality issues like never before.
"The issue for me was getting so many organisations around the table," she says. "We recognised early on that different trusts were at different stages, so a lot of work has gone into pitching the meetings to bring everyone up to the same level.
"But we now have a situation where we all have the same common goals and objectives. This is a way of us helping and supporting each other and also finding areas of excellent practice we can learn from."
Central Manchester has built a strong working relationship with Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority, which has supported the Trust in taking the lead to help the fourteen other Primary Care Trusts in the city identify what work needs to be done around race and health.
Another move initiated by the Trust and Manchester City Council was the organisation of a city-wide event with chief executives and chairs of all the public sector organisation to move the race agenda forward. The black voluntary sector was represented at the event by the Manchester Council for Community Relations, the Progress Trust and the Mohammed Iqbal Ullah Archive Library. "The event was an opportunity to look at what we are all doing individually and how we can move that forward to a collective response," says Evelyn. "It enabled us to share knowledge and discuss issues surrounding race as well as look at joint working in this area. We wanted senior people involved because we wanted them to give that level of credibility to the work."
Roots
All of the Trust's work involves input from local ethnic minority communities, with whom it has strong links through the city-wide Health Inequalities Partnership and the Health and Race Forum, in which community groups express the health needs of different communities. "The NHS was set up in the 1940s and the community that was around in the 1940s is very different to the one here today," says Claudette. "Yet services are still being delivered in the same traditional way. We have to begin to change our culture and the way in which our services are delivered. This isn't going to change overnight. But we can't sit still and ignore the fact that some health outcomes for some communities are really very poor."
Evelyn makes no bones about the fact that institutional racism has led to complacency within the NHS in the past. "People are scared of being labelled racist if they get things wrong or use the wrong language," she says. "There is a real fear out there of getting it wrong. I don't think we should pretend racism doesn't exist. It does. But we can't hide behind our anxieties and fear and allow that to be used as a reason not to do anything. "We need to create an environment where saying the wrong thing or making mistakes is okay, and celebrate diversity as a positive in the development of appropriate services for our residents."
She is optimistic that Race for Health and the leadership role that Central Manchester is playing can make a difference to ordinary people across the country.
"In Central Manchester we have a very diverse and vibrant community, with 38 per cent of people across our patch from black and ethnic minority communities," says Evelyn. "Leadership is about taking risks, leading the way, testing things out so other people can learn from the lessons we put in place. Ensuring that we provide effective and appropriate services for black and minority ethnic communities we will invariably be making services more appropriate for all our communities."