Welcome to a brief update of my BAME carers forum for the boroughs of Bromley, Lewisham and Greenwich. The focus is one of the 6 carer forums that focuses on discussions, awareness and campaigns regarding unpaid carers from an ethnic background specifically caring for a ‘loved one’ suffering mental ill health. Forum members do not have to have someone using the services, it could be they are caring for someone who might not be using the services of South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation trust or Oxleas NHS trust.
The BAME mental health carer forum update for July had the following speakers to engage with carers, although not in order.
- Lola Jaye (psychothearapist, author, speaker) – Why race matters when it comes to mental health
- Emma Wakeman (St Andrew’s Healthcare)- on The Missing Voices: Carers’ Experiences of Section 17 Leave (Mental Health Act 1983)
- Kuldip Kaur Kang (West midlands trust) – on Religious and cultural needs of BAME mental health inpatients request
- Rachel Nethercott – Carers UK focus on diversity unpaid carers
- Leonie Down (SLaM Lewisham Head of Occupational Therapy and Partnerships Lead ) – Update on Patient Carer Race Equality framework
- Dominic Parsons – Bromley, Lewisham & Greenwich Mind on their diversity initiatives.
- Professor Shirin Rai from Warwick University – On the Impact of covid-19 on bame carers
Judging by the speakers, you can see the BAME carers forum is held online and is also attended by mental health NHS trust staff working to understand the issues that affect ethnic unpaid carers and patients.
Lola Jaye Presents
Lola started her talk about how those from ethnic backgrounds experiences racism in everyday life, she pointed out that a lot of people at the carers forum may remember last year, where globally the Black Lives Matter movement began a lot of traction, plus several incidents that happened in the final or the Euro 2020 football match.
Many things have pushed the importance of diversity to the forefront including the impact of COVID-19 on ethnic groups, plus how it forced many to be online at work. Lola talked about the impact of racial trauma and it’s affects on mental health. Lola gave us several examples e.g. How many times have we heard a racist joke? How many times we seen racial slurs on the walls or been a victim of overt or even covert racism or racial profiling, sometimes even unconcious bias has an impact on diverse communities.
Lola mentioned as a psychotherapist she has noted many of her clients experiencing issues and a feeling of powerlessness because of what they have to be able to live with and these are things that cannot be ignored especially if health and social services have to takle the problems. The community must be a part of it.
Lola moved on to querying “what is self worth” to forum members. Lola raised how the media has bombared people with messages that challenges their self worth, especially young black people. Certain things in the media has lead to racial trauma. There were examples of you are British to the point where you serve the country and then can actually end up as the ‘other’ where you could be the ‘N’ word. Lola pointed out the positive experiences of the nation coming together to support black players in the Euro football campaign, but unfortunately incidents led to the importance of tackling racism online and offline.
Lola moved on to talk about the large scope of battles ethnic people have to take on. Discrimination globally has led to black people taking on more challenges be it inequalities in health and social care, racism, lack of resources regarding institional racism and more. Lola suggested people need to pick their battles because to tackle so many things will cause a mental strain. We would have to choose our battles. Discrimination can come as Little things, or big things? that those from ethnic backgrounds have to live with every day and god knows how the impact has affected those who unfortunately loose their mental health. Lola spoke more about institional racism in education, the criminal justice system and other places and why it is so important organisations especially health and social care become anti-racist organisations, but they need to work with the community although there is a problem with a power imbalance.
More of Lola’s work can be found on the following sites.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200804-black-lives-matter-protests-race-mental-health-therapy
https://www.adventureinblack.com/blog/mental-health-in-the-black-community-during-covid-19
Kuldip Kaur Kang presents on Religious and cultural needs of BAME mental health patients.
Kuldip who is a social worker for a west midlands NHS trust presented on her research about patients detained on an impatient setting. Emma conducted a lot of interviews and stated that it can be a challenge to know what issues are affecting mental health patients due to not understanding the reality of things.
The one of the main reason Kuldip chose her research was due to her ethnic background and the experiences she has had in the past. She felt concerned and wanted to highlight such issues, but was given the freedom to do so. She wanted to highlight the relation to our religious and cultural identity, but for our benefit at the forum she focused on the carer’s aspect of her research. Kuldip mentioned that although stats can be boring, they are useful in highlighting and evidencing research and it came to no surprise to people that stats show that people from a BAME background are detained from the mental health act is this is disproportionatly high.
Kuldip mentioned about the pressures on the ward, which can led to decisions overlooking patients culture and religious needs. These could be the high turnover on the wards, staff under pressure and lack of leadership. Religion is one of the things that can be important to inpatients, because of how they cope with their mental health although religous views can sometimes blur mental health understanding. Religion and cultural needs cannot be overlooked on a mental health setting. Kuldip spoke how it is so important to involve families and carers in their ‘loved ones’ care because they are more likely to understand the cultural and religous needs especially if the mental health service is under pressure already it would make sense to increase involvement from the patient’s circle of support network.
Kuldip also spoke about the importance of training staff to be more aware of patients needs, but she did stress that when staff feedback about training that they were not sure how to tackle certain issues. A good example of a patient washing their hands to pray, but was challenged because they suffered OCD. As mentioned religous practices of patients can blur into their mental illness, but it might be the one last thing the patient was holding on to. Kuldip also mentioned her research did include other ethnic communities from europe who used the services.
It was mentioned how staff on the wards found it so helpful that families and carers could help communicate cultural and religious needs on the wards, especially if the patient just could not communicate their needs. Kuldip did admit confidentiality did get in the way, but there were good reasons for this. Kuldip gave her recommendations of her study to the forum, which were well recieved.
See below for more of Kuldip’s work
Leonie down updates on the Patient Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF)
Leonie Down who is the Lead Occupational thearpist for Lewisham under SLaM started off by mentioning that PCREF is something that South London & Maudsley are focusing on in South London, and there are other Mental Health trusts around the country that are also involved in this. These being East London Mental Health trust, Birmingham & Solihil NHS Trust and Manchester mental health trust are involved in the NHS England & Improvement pilot.
Leonie mentioned that in the context of the community around inequalities and systemic racism, this gives hope, to people’s idea of trying to really challenge the power of organizations that proposes these big NHS sites, and sort of takes through a process of maybe the next year or so to identify how NHS can be better and addressing inequalities. Leonie felt it could demonstrate competency within all of the work SLaM do, so she thought maybe it’d be helpful summerize how staff, patient & carer and the community at large work together to identify what competencies on how do well SLaM is doing on BAME experiences of services.
Leonie updated on how we can have an equality in needs, which is being delivered in any partnership with the people that are seen as stakeholders. Secondly, she felt it really educational for the current meeting, discussing excellent knowledge, awareness, and cultural awareness. SL&M are going to find different experiences and initiatives and come up with a position where in February next year, they can kind of launch a proposal on what to work towards.
Emma Wakeman presents on The Missing Voices
Emma talked about the paper she wrote and the 4 main conclusions and findings which came out of the research paper.
https://www.york.ac.uk/spsw/news-and-events/news/2021/s17mha/
The first finding was about the emotional impact of anyone who’s caring any shape or form on how they can relate to emotional impact with the fact that carers felt their voices were not picked up enough.
If things did not go well for carers or they thought that they have been let down, then complaints would certainly appear in the services.
The second finding was on social systems and the affect of what happens if a person was taken out of their social system, what would be the result for carers. Emma mentioned the type of section had a major impact on how patients coped when they were removed from their social system.
The third point was on how carer’s sacrificed their time and energy into providing care and how section 17 dealt with such sacrifices. The 4th part of the paper was examing what support was given to carers and how sometimes there were challenges on getting that support.
Rachel Nethercott presents on Carer’s UK BAME carer’s initiatives.
Rachel Nethercott opened up her talk about how she works with CARERS UK in the policy and Public Affairs team. They have funded by the COVID-19 support fund to run a project with carers trust for Three years, and they will be looking at the experiences under representative carers from marginalized backgrounds. So those are LGBTQ carers, Black and Asian and older aged the carers particularly those who are digitally excluded and also carers of faith. So those groups are part of the project because they believe in dis-proportionally affected by the pandemic. The project itself will look at experiences during COVID and the measures beyond COVID.
Rachel wanted to talk about the BAME carers part of the project and how they are going to be taking a look at building on existing research for the project. Carers UK want to be able to work with services, make recommendations on areas to improve and how best to develop any good good practices that is working well. Carer’s UK also want to learn from those services and practices that do include carers. So for the three years to both carer support services and health and social care services, we hope those services will be more accessible as being tailored, beneficial and with recommendations.
Rachel gave an outline of the project and also allowed attendees to ask questions or feedback on the community project services.
Professor Shirin Rai from Warwick University presents
Professor Shirin wanted to share with us their new research. Prof Shirin did point out there is a problem of BAME communities not being involved in research, but also a lack of BAME communities carrying out research regarding race and mental health.
Her project is called “care, caring, and carers” which is why she thinks the main aim of our project is really to look at sort of care for older people in BAME communities, in Coventry and Leicester which are two diverse and wonderful cities. The research will look at the conditions and impact of COVID.
Professor Shirin really appreciated Lola emphasised the connection between Black Lives Matter movement with the experiences of BAME carers, because we all know the crisis affecting BAME communities, this has been experienced so many times.
Professor Shirin wants the project to try to connect with the carer and the caree. So for all the peoples care, the research also wishes to include both unpaid carers and paid carers. Prof Shirin feels the government has a habit of not funding well for unpaid carer while at the same time trying to learn from the community.
For more information about Professor Shirin’s new research please check the link below
https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/exploring_the_impact/
Thanks for checking out my brief update
A Caring Mind 