In this blog, Tess, Listen Up! Project Officer, explains why and how we’re helping people to understand their healthcare rights and have the confidence to speak up about them.
Groundswell exists to enable people who have experience of homelessness to create solutions and move themselves out of homelessness – to benefit of our whole society. Rights exist to ensure people affected by homelessness experience good health care and it is imperative everyone is equipped with the knowledge and confidence to enable those rights to be observed.
Three years ago, funding was granted to Groundswell from Comic Relief to create the Listen Up! project. It was decided there would be three different approaches to support people to speak up about health inequalities – community reporting, rapid research (resulting in the production of Insight reports) and rights-based training.
This is why for the last 18 months we’ve been squirreling away at the creation, development and production of materials around the topic of rights to good health and housing. Multiple questionnaires have been distributed to Groundswell staff and volunteers. There have been countless meetings and documents created to try and unpick this topic. We incorporated questions into our research to determine what rights people we spoke to were aware of.
The questionnaires and meetings allowed us to identify the most useful path to follow.
They told us:
- People experiencing homelessness are tired of the onus of knowing what they are entitled to falling on their shoulders, and that they wanted better training for staff in services they access.
- That everyone has different abilities and learning styles – there should be a variety of ways to access material in various different formats.
- That health rights were more unknown than housing rights.
- Everyone we spoke to wished for more accessible information about rights.
Rights form the frame for how we should expect to be treated and guide how we should treat each other. There are rights for almost every critical part of life – including around our health and housing.
Knowing what we’re entitled to can help us to identify when things are wrong and give us the right language to address the issues.
The UN recognises access to adequate housing to be a human right. We know from our own experiences and from the people we work with that this is hard to enforce in the UK, where there isn’t sufficiently adequate housing and steps can be seen to address this deficit.
In health, we have the NHS Constitution, which lists all the rights we can expect from healthcare. This document makes it easier to understand but… it’s 87 pages long! If you are facing inequality and want to challenge how you are being treated, how likely are you to look up this document and sift through it for the information you need and then work out how to apply it?
And this brings us back to the challenge faced by Listen Up!, and others, where we are trying to empower confidence in those most likely to experience ill-treatment.
Our discussions with stakeholders have shown us the need for a different way of providing information and a need to be innovative. We learned that its people working in services who need to be aware of rights, not only those experiencing homelessness. We have heard that information needs to be accessible in multiple ways.
And now, we think we may have created a way which can help: Your Rights training.
We have launched a pocket guide to healthcare rights alongside some bitesized e-learning, which takes some of our healthcare rights and explores them in an interactive format. We also have workshops for people experiencing homelessness and those working in homelessness services.
Our training and resources will give people the knowledge and skills needed to make decisions about their own healthcare and housing; the right tools to grasp on to those slippery building blocks.
Together, we can understand our rights and have the confidence to apply them.