NHS Lanarkshire’s Keep Well Team Nurses had established links with the Gypsy traveller community in Lanarkshire. They already carried out health checks, monitored blood pressure and diabetes, addressed issues of mental ill health and wellbeing and had built up a rapport with the community but they wanted to go beyond the medical needs they were trying to meet and to engage with the community to find out what really mattered to them.
In 2018, through the Keep Well Team’s established links and with support from the site manager, Gillian Ventura attended a Keep Well clinic where she met 14 members of the Gypsy Traveller community and asked the question, ‘What matters to you?’
It became clear that what mattered most to this community is something that most of us take for granted – access to health services. Specifically this included:
Getting Registered for Health Services
- ‘I am a traveller and it is difficult to get a doctor when I move to a new area to get registered there. Wherever we are staying it is difficult to get treatment for me and my family’
- ‘Very difficult to get registered for a doctor’s surgery and dentists’
- ‘I have to travel back to another area to get my repeat prescriptions’
Appointments
- ‘Just being able to see a doctor’
- ‘I am a carer for my mother and when I have phoned for an appointment for her (she is 85) I sometimes I have been told that it would be 3 weeks for an appointment – it’s not very good’
Communication
- ‘Someone to listen to me when I tell them I am unwell’
- ‘Tell me how it is! No medical jargon or big words’
- ‘Good communication. Important when you suffer from mental health. If clear and spoken to and explained to you, it makes you feel confident in your treatment. A smile makes all the difference’
- ‘People taking the time to speak and explain things’
Gillian developed an Easy Read note of the meeting and shared it with all participants.
The output from the work was also shared with the Travelling Community Network and with Scottish Government to help raise the profile of the issues that matter to this community. An action plan Improving the Lives of Scotland’s Gypsy/Travellers (2019- 2021) was launched by Scottish Government with 5 key priorities:
- provide more and better accommodation
- improve access to public services
- better incomes in and out of work
- tackle racism and discrimination and
- improve Gypsy/Traveller representation