We’re delighted to announce that we have welcomed the first cohort of student nurses from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) as part of a new civic engagement placement programme.
Building on partnerships across the region, the placements aim to provide learning experiences that will deepen students’ understanding of health and the impact of the wider social determinants, including housing and community.
During the programme, nurses are given the opportunity to listen to people’s stories to understand the things which are important to them, develop a deeper understanding of how social inequalities impact health, and develop an awareness of the help and support available in our communities.
The placements support NHS England’s advice to CCGs, recognising of the role housing plays in a person’s health, and subsequent costs that poor quality housing can bring, stating that “Housing organisations are often well placed to partner NHS in its prevention strategies because they are in touch with large numbers of vulnerable people, including older people and disabled people, and they have a long history of supporting them to live independently in the community” (Source: NHS England Publications Gateway Reference: 05939)
Pam Donaghy, Civic Engagement Lead for HEE Placement Expansion Project at LJMU said:
“For a long time, health students have only been in clinical areas, and by putting them out into communities, they have a better understanding of the difficulties that people experience in their day to day life. By understanding those difficulties that people are facing we can actually train our nurses to be better at health promotion in the future.
An example is: when a person who smokes comes into a healthcare situation, if we understand that they are in a situation where they are living in poverty, they’re unemployed, or they don’t know how they’re going to feed their children and how you’re going to pay your bills, then they might not be in a place where they can just ‘stop smoking’, we can look at the most appropriate support for their circumstances, making it more effective.”
Jessica Sales, nursing student at Liverpool John Moores University, said:
“My placement at Cobalt Housing is the first civic engagement placement that I’ve been a part of, I’ve not done that before, my previous ones have been clinical areas, hospital wards, GP areas, so this is completely new for me.
Within the placement we’re looking at individuals who are supported with their housing, seeing where people are living, what barriers are people facing, and how can we support them, where we can intervene, what measures we can put in place to make simple living easier so they can have better outcomes and become healthier.”
The civic engagement placement continues the partnership built between LJMU and Cobalt Housing through the ongoing 2-year mKTP project, which received financial support from the UK government department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) through Innovate UK. An mKTP aims to help businesses improve their efficiency and productivity through the better use of knowledge and expertise by specialist Academic teams in the UK’s world class Knowledge Bases.
Promoting the critical role of housing in a person’s health has been a continued theme for Cobalt Housing, as they work on other projects including the ‘Our Croxteth’ initiative, which has seen Cobalt make innovative links with health teams in Liverpool including Mersey Care NHS and neighbourhood GPs. The initiative has established common goals for the anchor organisations to work towards for greater impact, and through pooling resources together, they have distributed funding for community projects, to tackle key issues around health and wellbeing, defined and chosen by local residents.
Staff at Cobalt Housing also now sit on the local NHS integrated care team, ensuring that Cobalt Housing, as landlords, are doing all they can to support the other agencies, helping to ensure that the most vulnerable people are getting the care that they need.
Alan Rogers, Chief Executive at Cobalt Housing, said:
“These placements will give the student nurses practical experience in dealing with the complex lives that people may have, and the support that they need.
Over the past few years we have made huge progress in building relationships and establishing key projects to highlight how varied and important the role of housing, and housing associations, are in people’s health and wellbeing. We’ve now got a formal partnership with a number of health and local authority organisations to work collaboratively, meaning we are now working together to joint goals, maximising the positive impact we can all have on our tenants and communities.”
