Published on 11 December 2023
The Cancer Alliance’s lead on heath inequalities has featured in a national podcast which is helping to inspire change across the NHS.
Jo Trask, Health Inequalities and Patient Engagement Programme Manager, features in the podcast as part of learning platform The School For Change Agents.
Hosted by Kerry McGinty, of NHS Futures, the podcast is one of a series called Agents Assemble, inspiring people to create positive change in their own area of the NHS.
This latest series of the podcasts have been created in conjunction with NHS England’s Health Inequalities Improvement team to encourage more people across the system to understand the barriers to treatment and care, and work towards improving access to healthcare.
Jo tells Kerry how tackling health inequality is “everyone’s business” at the Cancer Alliance, meaning that all projects and pieces of work include ways to break down barriers to accessing healthcare.
She says that her team has created a ‘1,2,3 approach’, whereby colleagues are given resources, training and support to reduce health inequalities in their own work, but they are expected to take responsibility for improving equity of access in their programmes.
Jo also spoke about how the Cancer Alliance has launched a Staff Health Inequalities Network, where 60 health staff from across Merseyside and Cheshire meet virtually once a month to talk about inequalities.
Jo also talks about how her personal experiences have shaped her passion to tackle discrimination and inequalities in healthcare and outlines a project her team initiated to directly contact by phone people who failed to attend cancer screening, to try to remove any barriers they face in coming forward. Jo says the project has seen a rebooking rate of 85%.
You can listen to the podcast here:
The School for Change Agents, from NHS Horizons, is a free, online, self-paced course designed for health and care staff at any level. For more information, go to: https://horizonsnhs.com/school/