Community Health and Wellbeing Workers Star Appeal

Charting a Course for Equitable Healthcare: From Distinguished Visits to Collaborative Action, CHWWs Lead the Way. 

Following some star-sprinkled visits this year by Professor Kamila Hawthorne, Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, and Professor Hilary Cottam, an innovator, expert in scaling systemic innovation, and author of Radical Help, we were proud to host Professor Bola Owolabi, GP and Director of the National Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Programme at NHS England, Sarah Woolnough, Chief Executive of the Kings Fund last week! 

The day brought together the Chair of the NAPC Caroline Taylor, Deputy CEO Matthew Walker, Chief Executive of the North West London Integrated Care Board Toby Lambert, Katherine Langford and June Farquarson from the health equity team at the ICB, Chanelle Corena, Senior Innovation Manager at Imperial College Health Partners, the Director of Community Services at CLCH Jo Davies, one of the clinical Directors of Healthcare Central London Dr Saul Kaufman, Patrick King from the Reform Think tank as well as the Imperial team Dr Matthew Harris and Dr Cornelia Junghans Minton from the Innovation and Evaluation theme of the NIHR ARC NWL. The real stars were some of the CHWWs from the pilot (Maureen Katusabe, Nahima Begum, Comfort Idowu-Fearon), the new CHWW project managers from the Abbey centre (Sophie Kuprashvili) and Paddington Development Trust (Emma Sweany) and 3 CHWWs from the Church st team – Sheuly, Hamza and Jade, who showed the guests around Lisson grove and Church st for a lunch time walk after showcasing the initiative and explaining how they tackle local health inequalities in a personalised way. Thomas Herweijer, Programme Transformation Manager from the South West London Health and Care Partnership and implementation lead for the CHWWs in South West London ICS attended the morning as well and took Professor Owolabi off to Wandsworth to meet the CHWWs and local team there. As the CHWW initiative grows in Westminster and Cornwall, and embeds in multiple new localities such as Selby and Hillingdon, we look forward to even more measurable impact through this innovative model inspired by the Brazilian Family Health Strategy.  We also look forward to the NAPC who will hold its next quarterly learning workshop on the model on the 17th April.