South Birmingham PCT ... Re-engineering for childhood disability
At one time, a parent of a severely disabled child from a BME community could expect a standard NHS service: various people doing clinical tests and a professional in an office delivering the decision. Most of the staff, particularly key professionals, would have been White Britons.
'Such an environment was extremely difficult for a family to navigate,' explains Billy Foreman, South Birmingham PCT's assistant director, health and social policy. 'The old-style approach makes it hard to ask questions or even know what the right questions are. Parents do not emerge empowered. Yet, we need to develop the "expert parent" able to choose, for example, the best school for their child.'
That's why South Birmingham PCT now recruits people from BME communities to train as para-professionals who are then attached to specialist services including special schools, Children's Disability Centres, Sure Start programmes, Children's Centres and district nursing teams. Similar para-professionals are increasingly also used in family support, long-term conditions, peri-natal mortality and male mortality for high-risk communities.
'The para-professionals go out and find parents of these children with disabilities,' says Billy Foreman. 'The parents' experience may have been of a system that treated them unfairly. So, to find someone from their community at their door offering wide-ranging help rebuilds trust.
'We are effectively re-engineering the relationship between parents and the NHS. It is changing from one in which the parents are passive into one that works for them and for their child.'