Community Health and Wellbeing Workers Making Waves

Empowering Communities, Inspiring Change: CHWWs Welcomed Esteemed Visitors, Pioneering Innovation and Collaboration. 

By January, The Community Health and Wellbeing Workers (CHWWs) already received two fantastic visits this year. Dr Kamila Hawthorne, Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners came to visit the Community Health and Wellbeing Worker initiative in Westminster, which has been a rare example of reverse innovation, supported with implementation and evaluation expertise from ARC NWL at Imperial College London. Followed by a visit from Professor Hilary Cottam, an innovator, expert in scaling systemic innovation, and author of Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State. The team were able to showcase the initiative, which prioritises relationship building over transactional care, and receive valuable insights from Professor Cottam on propagating and protecting an innovative programme like the CHWWs. 

Dr Hawthorne writes in her January 2024 newsletter: 

“Last week, I visited Dr Sheila Neogi, Dr Connie Junghans Minton and their team of community health and wellbeing workers (CHWWs or ‘Chewies’ as they are fondly called) at the Marven practice in Pimlico, Westminster. The Chewies look after about 120 households each in the deprived Churchill Gardens estate opposite the practice, visiting each month.

I heard from Dr Matt Harris, a public health consultant at Imperial College London, who brought the idea back from working as a GP in Brazil, where it has resulted in dramatic improvements in population health. It’s a simple, visionary and elegant model, and Dr Saul Kaufman, one of the Westminster clinical directors, described how it has inspired the locality to expand the model to 30 Chewies, paid through ARRS funds across four PCNs to help the most needy residents in the borough. Not only has this method provided signposting to other, more suitable services that patients needed, but it has reduced the number of appointments taken up in general practice, while also discovering patients who never come to the GP, but who need to. I came away absolutely inspired and energised! If you’d like to know more, watch the six-minute clip ‘Community Health Workers in Churchill Gardens – Learning from the Brazilian Model’.  […]  It’s just amazing what is going on out there, and I’d love to hear from more of you who are working in innovative ways to improve healthcare for your communities.”