Health & Wellbeing

Euella Jackson (Chair)

Zahra Kosar

+ Advisory members:

Aled Osborne

Natalie Campbell

Stephanie Champion

Lauren Tittle

Rami Ghali

Sharon Woma

Subitha Baghirathan

The Health and Wellbeing task-group was formed out of the Bristol Commission of Race Equality in Spring 2021. In March 2021, we invited Carol Slater, Head of Public Health at Bristol City Council to inform the task group of the current state of public health in the city and the racial disparities - particularly in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Advisory members from a range of different community and mainstream health organisations in Bristol were invited to join in April 2021 and at our first meeting we shared the task-group’s three key objectives. We have spent the past few months developing a realistic strategy. To narrow down our focus, in September 2021, we took the decision to prioritise supporting Black, Asian and Minoritised refugee and asylum seekers and use our three objectives (see below) to measure and focus our impact.

Objective 1: To empower the community to access and take full advantage of the city’s (mental) health and wellbeing services, provisions, and resources.

  • In the short-term, the task group wants to engage with the existing support organisations that work with these communities and refugee and asylum seekers to identify challenges, support, and service offerings.

  • The work stream’s chair has been attending meetings alongside the other task group chairs to ensure synergy and consistency across the CoRE. The health and wellbeing group hopes to work with Sister Jendayi to engage, talk with and speak with the community about taking full advantage of the city’s services and understand the challenges they may face.

  • The health and wellbeing task-group is working on developing a communication strategy to increase the group’s visibility among the community and remain connected to the concerns of the community.

Objective 2: To influence and interrogate the commissioning of health (and mental health) and wellbeing services, provision, and procurement in the city.

  • Link up with the work being done with Black South West Network’s Make It Work initiative that supports Bristol’s Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic enterprises and VCSE organisations to work with Bristol City Council’s care commissioning framework.

  • Acquire Bristol City Council’s Care Commissioning Timetable for the next few years, so we can influence commissioning in advance of deadlines.

Objective 3: To promote the use of community-centred/led data in decision-making as an industry standard/ best practice.

  • We plan to use the information acquired from community and organisational consultation to develop a best practice framework for commissioning bodies.

  • Alongside this, we will conduct a mapping exercise to identify where the commissioning opportunities are in the region - identify where the gaps are.

  • We hope to compile a letter to the commissioning and public bodies with a call to action, requesting that they give commitment to reducing health inequalities for BAME refugee and asylum seekers, with the priorities we identify in the letter.