Breaking down barriers to healthcare services
A new job role that helps to raise awareness of healthcare services, lifesaving skills, and job opportunities within the NHS.
North East England
NHS Charities Together funded the Positive Action Lead role.
Loveness is a Positive Action Lead at North East Ambulance Service.
Originally from Africa, she came to the UK around 20 years ago and found herself in a life-threatening situation soon after she arrived. She had no knowledge about the services available to help her. Thankfully, her mother-in-law was able to call an ambulance and get her the support she needed.
The experience caused Loveness to be passionate about educating others on the support available to them. She helps by running workshops on available services, skills such as first aid and CPR, and how to apply for jobs in the NHS.
Loveness also recruits and trains community ambassadors as part of her role. Thanks to them, these local communities have even more sources of support and knowledge they can turn to for help.
Meet Loveness
We spoke to Loveness about what her role involves. She said:
"Day to day I reach out to community groups and individuals, and I will attend and deliver workshops with them. Our most popular workshop is an awareness one where we teach people about how to access 111, 999 and patient transport services.
"We find people don’t reach out for help until it’s too late due to the lack of awareness. We educate them on the processes here. Most people didn’t know we provide access help in terms of interpreting services. When we first started, we had over 4,000 people using our language telephone interpreting service per year. This has now near doubled, which is something we are really proud of.
"We’ve built a fantastic presence now and we are known as an organisation that works with ethnic minorities. These groups will now reach out to us and ask us to attend their events to educate communities on what we do. It's great to be invited to events like these.
"The 'lifesaving skills' workshop has been really important because we know ethnic minorities have a higher risk of having cardiac diseases and cardiac arrest. People don’t know how to do CPR or how to use a defibrillator. We put on demonstrations, and they get to practise doing CPR and it gives them the confidence that if they were ever in that situation they would know when to seek help.
"It’s hard to describe the feeling of these workshops but the joy it brings to people is wonderful and the learning that comes out of it is amazing!"
