Central and North West London services collaborate with communities to understand and tailor services to address local health needs and reduce health inequalities.
The Community Collaboration programme fosters an inclusive and flexible approach to working with clients, partners, and colleagues to design and deliver integrated services that address diverse community needs by building on successful methods and exploring new ones.
This is a unique practice developed over many years. We achieve Community collaboration approaches by following these four principles:
- Listen
- Learn
- Collaborate
- Drive Equality
These principles highlight the importance of engaging with local communities to build trust and understand any challenges in accessing local services. Listening to community members takes time and effort, but it helps to identify resources and insights that enhance access to care to reduce health disparities.
According to professional guidelines at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy (RCSLT), we should be working to ‘maintain, develop or enhance a client’s home language’.
Following discussion with key stakeholders, our service recruited bilingual co-workers in Ealing’s 6 majority languages:
- Punjabi
- Urdu
- Tamil
- Polish
- Somali
- Arabic
Evaluation results
In 2024, two University College London (UCL) masters students evaluated the impact of this service change through surveys of staff and the bilingual co-workers.
The key findings were:
- A decrease of the use of interpreters and other inappropriate informal methods for the use of speech and language therapists assessments and therapy.
- An increase in confidence levels of speech and language therapists supporting bilingual families due to the use of bilingual co-workers
- A significant improvement of cultural awareness of speech and language therapists
- Improved rapport built with children, young people and their families
- Enhanced communication with families
- A significant improvement in quality of interpretation
Feedback
“They have taught me an infinite amount in 6 months, about communities that I have worked in with over 6 years. It has boosted my morale as I can tell the quality of parent meetings and therapy sessions has improved.”
“Wow Ms X, you are a Muslim like me and speaks Somali like me! (smiling a lot)"
“Bilingual co-workers allow speech and language therapists to carry out equitable work with families who speak another language. It is not possible to provide the same high quality care to families when using an interpreter”