Provide Community Impact Report 2021-22

Community Impact Report 2021-2022

Welcome to the Provide Community 2021-22 Community Impact Report

Established as a Community Interest Company in 2011, Provide Community is a social enterprise delivering a broad range of community health and social care services across Essex and East Anglia in NHS and community care settings.

Provide Community operates as a not-for-profit organisation. As such we are dedicated to reinvesting our surpluses back into our services and the communities we serve. With a vision to transform lives through our values of care, innovation and compassion, we have a growing portfolio of divisions dedicated to delivering ongoing improvement, accessibility and quality of services. An example is Provide Digital, creating intelligent digital solutions for better health experiences.

As an employee-owned enterprise, our workforce of over 1200 colleagues is responsible for making key business decisions, including nominating local causes to benefit from funding and donation initiatives. To date, we have donated more than £3.5 million to charities, education and community organisations.

Provide Community is also one of three organisations that make up the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (MSECC), which has been nationally recognised as a regional exemplar for its sharing of best practice, collaboration and innovation to improve the quality and efficiency of health and social care services.

O U R M I S S I O N O U R M I S S I O N

Proud to be Transforming Lives

I am exceptionally proud to lead an organisation that truly represents its vision, mission and values. This Community Impact supplement gives insight into the many ways our colleagues, volunteers and partners are helping to transform lives every day.

As our organisation grows in size and influence, our mission is evolving to positively impact every part of the communities we serve. We do this as a community that values and empowers its colleagues to achieve exceptional outcomes.

I always say we are a small organisation that punches above its weight, and in the last year, Provide Community has been recognised regionally and nationally as a centre of excellence for its business culture, capability and community impact.

The future is exciting, and it is heartwarming to know that our culture, fuelled by care, innovation and compassion has enabled Provide Community to grow in its reach and continue to transform lives for more people than ever.

Mark Heasman Group Chief Executive, Provide Community

We’re an Exceptional Community Interest Company

As the Provide Community Chair of Governors, I am honoured to introduce our 2021-22 Community Impact Report, detailing an unprecedented level of support in care, innovation and compassion to the communities we serve.

As a member-owned organisation, our colleagues have opportunities to shape our organisation and its community impact that is unique in our sector. Our Governors are active at every touchpoint, from supporting innovative ideas and representing member voices in our workplaces to helping colleagues support the causes that matter most to them through donations, match funding and volunteering.

In the last year, we have trebled our community grants and donations, and seen first-hand how this funding makes a significant and lasting impact across our service areas. This demonstration of care, innovation and compassion is inspiring and testament to our amazing colleagues in Provide Community.

Helen Keller said, “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much,” and I am incredibly proud, not just of what we have already achieved together, but what is yet to come.

Nicola Yarnall

Audiologist & Service lead for Community ENT & Paediatric Audiology and Chair of the Council of Governors

O U R V I S I O N

Care Care

Our mission to Transform Lives is delivered through our many care pathways. Our exceptional colleagues strive for excellence by listening to our service users and responding with empathy.

Transforming Care Through Collaboration: Urgent Community Response Teams

The Urgent Community Response Teams (UCRT) services are part of the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (MSECC), a groundbreaking healthcare collaboration that is transforming services by working together. Prior to the collaborative, there were four separate UCRT services across Mid and South Essex (MSE) provided by three community organisations; the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT), North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) and Provide Community.

A referral to the UCRT is an alternative to a hospital visit or stay, improving patient care by enabling people to receive treatment in their own homes with improved quality of care. This also helps to reduce the risk of infections and deconditioning within hospitals, reducing the pressure on services and teams in hospitals and avoiding further deterioration by treating people at home.

The UCRT service is available seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, with patients contacted or visited within two hours of a referral.

Since the service began in 2020, referrals to UCRT have increased by 87%, helping to avoid acute admissions, reducing demand elsewhere in the system. For every UCRT referral, 7.2 acute bed days are saved on average, with an estimated cost avoidance of £308 per bed day.

Kath Evans, Deputy Director of Urgent Community Response for the Ageing Well Programme as part of the NHS Long Term Plan in NHS England and NHS Improvement described MSECC as “a leading example of successful collaboration, providing valuable insights into how UCR providers can more effectively manage demand and capacity and demonstrating how place-based services can be scaled up across a broader health system to deliver a consistent level of care.”

Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative

For every UCRT referral, an average of 7.2 acute bed days are saved, with an estimated cost avoidance of £308 per bed day.

In December last year, UCRT was featured on ITV News, for which they interviewed a 77-year-old patient who described the service as “amazing”. The service has also been commended by central government, with Health Secretary Sajid Javid visiting UCRT at Rochford Community Hospital. He described the work

Care Through Communications

In autumn 2021, we commissioned the independent charity Healthwatch Essex to support the creation of a joint patient engagement strategy. This comprised of patient focus groups and interviews. Our new strategy includes a citizens panel led by MSECC and our partners to ensure our information is accessible and represents a wide demographic of patient voices.

A series of focus groups were conducted across all service user demographics, including:

Young Mental Health Ambassadors

Sensory Impaired service users

LD and Autism service users

Carers

Physical impairment service users

Service users who have accessed mental health services

Elderly and frail service users

We now have a strategy that represents the voices of the citizens of Essex. Community engagement feedback examples:

Accessible information is vital. The number of times I have been sent a letter providing me an update or appointment. I’m blind, how am I supposed to know what it says?

Person with sensory loss

I am fine meeting face to face, but I do not have the confidence to use Zoom and Teams by myself. I have found it difficult recently.

Person with learning difficulties

I don’t always access my emails and don’t use any social media. I much prefer a phone call or a letter with a name of a person I need to speak to if I need help.

Service user and lived experience volunteer

I just feel sometimes we carers are excluded; we are experts in caring for our loved one but it seems we aren’t important and are forgotten about.

Person with caring responsibility

Clinical colleagues in our COPD service led the Mid and South Essex Long COVID Service, which was made up of a multidisciplinary expert team working across Mid and South Essex. This service was recognised as an exemplar in The NHS Plan for Improving Long COVID Services (NHS England July 2022 Publication approval reference: C1607).

The NHS Plan notes the pioneering use of a mobile clinic in a van to give residents in hard-to-reach areas access to high-quality proactive and preventative care for post-COVID syndrome and its symptoms. The outreach van goes to communities to offer health checks and

diagnostic tests for adults, children, and young people, including blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, spirometry, other tests for breathlessness, and 6-lead electrocardiography.

The Long COVID team works with other local teams to provide information on smoking cessation, social prescribing, and local facilities. Patients referred to the Long COVID clinic can book appointments to be seen in the van or people can walk in to talk to the team about Long COVID and its symptoms.

A New Approach to Sexual Health

The Essex Sexual Health Service is aimed at supporting the sexual health of young people in Essex. Service users download a free app, developed by Provide Digital to access three informative animations about sexual health. Once registered for the virtual eCCard, holders can visit convenient locations across Essex, scan a QR code and discreetly collect free condoms and lube.

The service has continued to evolve with additional advice and resources on sexual health, the law and much more. This year, Provide Community will extend the service with the installation of vending machines on campus at The University of Essex in Colchester, Writtle College, and Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford. At these locations, young people aged 16-24 can access free condoms and lube 24/7 by scanning a QR code from the app or by accessing the onscreen sexual health information.

New Spirometry Diagnostic Units Support Respiratory Needs

This year we opened a new Spirometry Diagnostic Unit at Kestrel House, Chelmsford, enabling greater provision for the respiratory needs of our Mid and South Essex communities. The Spirometry Diagnostic Unit was delivered by the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (MSECC).

The new innovative modular units are purposebuilt spaces designed to provide diagnostic support and clinical assessment for people living with COPD, asthma and other lung conditions. The Spirometry Diagnostic Unit is a portable modular self-contained unit which allows patients and clinicians to meet safely in two sealed areas, where they can communicate through a glass screen. A high-speed air exchange filtration system (60 ac/hr) and UV-C lighting thoroughly disinfects rooms quickly between each patient, allowing for multiple daily consultations without risk of infection. Respiratory patients will no longer need to deal with the challenges of accessing services in busy and shared healthcare premises.

James Wilson, Transformation Director, MSECC said, “Having these new units available means we can deliver respiratory support closer to home for people who may have been unable to access services previously – all while keeping our staff and service users safe in the process.”

Innovation Innovation at our Core

I am really excited to launch Provides’ own version of Dragons Den! We have so many creative and entrepreneurial colleagues that I am convinced we will see some fantastic ideas that grow our business and support colleagues to succeed in bringing ideas to life.

Vicky Waldron, Chief Commercial Officer

Revolutionisin g Community Nursing

The challenge: Community Nursing teams had limited access to records in the field and were spending extensive amounts of time manually writing follow-up notes.

The solution: Community Nursing teams were issued with new smartphones and Provide Community Nursing and Systems teams worked together to roll out a pilot of the Brigid App in 2022. Brigid enables nurses to access and update records in real time, giving them a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips, including health records, medical appointments and prescribed medications. From any location, nurses can now see what actions their

At Provide Community our innovation value is at the core of how we think, act and invest to improve services and transform lives.

Innovation starts with an idea, and comes to life through listening, support and investment. As a social enterprise, we value the thoughts and ideas of all our colleagues, and in 2021 we introduced the Provide Community Innovation Tree to encourage innovative ideas from our colleagues. We will actively support and invest in new thinking - our only requirement is that ideas are bold and present opportunities to deliver a return on time, effort and resources.

In 2022 we are proud to have seen Provide Community’s innovation recognised in the Health Service Journal (HSJ) Awards for ‘Driving Efficiency Through Technology.’

colleagues have taken in real-time, and how they have been interacting with other service teams.

The feedback: Karen Wheeler, Senior Clinical Manager at Provide Community, said: “Brigid has transformed the patient journey, enabling us to make more informed decisions, for example, around the medication the patient is on and how that impacts clinical intervention and their journey. We can see the other professionals that are involved with the patient, pick up test results from the system, access key codes, letters around recent appointments and discharge information.”

Dictation Paves the Way Forward for

The challenge: Clinical staff spend hours updating records and typing up recorded notes. The solution: DragonOne is a piece of medical dictation software that allows clinical staff to dictate directly into SystmOne records to update reports, emails and documents. Clinicians can also control the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) with their voice, such as opening and navigating templates.

During home visits, nurses are able to securely access patient records and speak to DragonOne to directly dictate notes into the records. There is even an option to pre-set phrases where the software will automate the content in advance. Nurses are now able to record decisions and interventions in real time without having to spend extra hours outside of patient visits writing up recorded notes.

The outcome: During the pilot period, the top ten initial users saved 159 hours’ worth of typing time, enabling better work/life balance and more nursing hours that would be spent on administration. There has also been evidence of improved record keeping in respect of clinical information and timeliness of recording.

District Nurse Team Leader: “I have found the Dragon One software extremely helpful. I find my notes are much more detailed and I write so much more. It is saving me time every day and I am now reducing the amount of time I spend in my own time catching up on my documentation. It is the best thing Provide has introduced and I love it.”

Would you like to share your ideas and if you choose, be part of the Innovation Project Team that will bring our idea to life?

Early Years Innovation

Through Provide Community, expectant and new parents in Essex can benefit from accessible technology that will enable them to digitally track, manage and record every aspect of their baby’s health from birth to early years.

The new digital eRedbook enables a full suite of health and development records to be viewed and updated remotely by health professionals and accessed securely by parents from their smartphone or online.

The eRedbook is a huge step-change for new parents to enable them to access important records about their baby’s health and development from a mobile app. Giving parents a resource to manage interactive data and access real-time information and guidance as their child grows is particularly exciting.

Hannah Barber, maternity lead at Mid and South Essex University Hospitals Group

Transforming Patient Communications

The Communications Annexe is a new tool within SystmOne which allows for simple and easy digital communication with patients by combining SMS messaging, emails and AirMid notifications in one place.

The Annexe has been enabled across all Care Coordination Centres and Wellbeing. All planned services are making use of the standardised pre-set messages and are continuously sending service specific messages including URLs for service information, letters and packs.

The Communications Annexe has had some other useful functionalities such as allowing patients to book an appointment or answer a questionnaire digitally via a secure link.

New Autoplanner Frees Up Clinician Hours

The challenge: Saving senior clinicians valuable patient-facing time by eliminating the need to manually update their schedules.

The solution: Autoplanner allows users to automatically schedule all of their visits for a caseload on a daily basis. The system matches the journeys and direction of travel to plan visits with maximum efficiency and minimum mileage.

The system also analyses the type of visit, required skill sets, and direction of travel for each nurse and matches them with a patient visit that best suits them, including factoring in the most efficient route.

The outcome: In the first pilot period, Provide Community saw a huge reduction in the time spent on scheduling all ICR visits, falling from 532.5 hours of nursing time a week to just 40 across all teams. This represents 20,956 hours saved annually with a 5% reduction in deferred or cancelled visits.

Wearable Headsets Enhance Remote Care

Wearable technology that enables Community Nursing Teams to liaise remotely by video link has been introduced.

The headsets work by allowing healthcare specialists to see through the eyes of each health professional and start dialogue during appointments via a secure live video link to seek realtime advice or a second opinion on how best to treat each patient during their consultation. Not only will this enable teams to enhance their care service, but it will also help avoid any delays by providing a much swifter treatment and unnecessary further appointments.

Innovation Through Collaboration

The Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (MSECC) is a collaboration of three organisations that were previously working in silos. The Essex Partnership University Trust (EPUT), North-East London Foundation Trust (NELFT) and Provide Community came together with a mission to work together to share skills, best practice and innovation in capability and delivery.

The collaboration has significantly improved the quality and efficiency of care, improved access to a range of services and removed the postcode lottery. MSECC has driven a new era of sharing best practice, collaboration and innovation that has been recognised at a national level.

MSECC has delivered innovation across community

The Virtual Hospital

Innovation

Virtual Ward Outcomes. Patients are: 5x less likely 8x less likely 93%

to acquire an infection to experience deconditioning of VH patients achieve ideal outcomes*

In December 2021, MSECC rapidly introduced a Virtual Hospital (VH), implementing respiratory and frailty wards to support up to 135 patients in response to the Omicron wave of Covid-19 and winter pressures.

The Frailty Virtual Ward is supported by Carecall24 7, utilising the care technology service, to provide telecare to enable proactive support plans to be initiated in response to trends and flags that indicate a pattern or change in health needs.

cited

*compared to 55% system wide in 2019

Our work using Whzan health monitoring technology in care homes has been

within briefings at No.10 as an area of best practice

The Bed Bureau

“MSECC’s invaluable booking and capacity tracking tool has supported the reduction in turnaround of referral to placement from two hours to 15 minutes.” Gary Spurway, MSE University Hospitals Group

MSECC brought together a single community bed service for residents of MSE, drawing on digital innovation to effectively manage the pooling of our resources. Through our collaborative service, three acute hospitals and all out of area hospitals refer to one system-wide resource, with common oversight and acceptance criteria, which we call The Bed Bureau. This is supported by The Bed Bureau App; bespoke software developed by one of our collaborative partners’ digital arm to give staff visible control and manage all bed space across our collaborative’s network efficiently.

Supporting Innovation Through Research

In 2022, Provide Community gifted £135,000 to the University of Essex to fund a three-year research fellowship with the newly launched Institute of Public Health and Wellbeing.

For many years Provide has supported our community to take on key health challenges through research, employability and knowledge exchange activities. This significant investment is a testament to Provide’s commitment to improving health and wellbeing and quality of life across the East

Professor Anthony Forster, Vice Chancellor of the University of Essex

Compassion

As a Community Interest Company and social enterprise, we are committed to supporting charities and community groups in the communities we serve through Governors’ donations, community grant giving initiatives, and match funding

Our pledge to reinvest our surpluses to worthy causes means that as our business grows and thrives, we can do even more. In 2022 alone, we have been able to treble our donations, grants and match funding to more than £500,000.

Compassion

Essex Family Support Service The Peaceful Pony

£5,000

In May of this year, one of our Governors, Lindsay Partner, visited Community360 to deliver a £5,000 Governor donation to the Essex Family Support Service, a charity that provides low-level preventive care and support to disadvantaged families.

Michael Glassock, our Vice Chair of Governors switched up the day job and joined Nita Jhummu on Chelmsford Community Radio to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week and talk about Provide Community’s £5,000 Governor donation to the Assure Pregnancy and Baby Loss Support charity.

Assure Pregnancy and Baby Loss Support charity

Our Chair of the Council of Governors, Nicola Yarnall, visited The Peaceful Pony, an equine animal therapy centre in Benfleet, to present founder Holly Lockwood-Waduge with a donation of £5,000

Colchester-based St Helena Hospice received a £5,000 Governor donation to contribute towards its palliative care services.

St Helena Hospice

Headway Essex, a charity supporting people with acquired brain injuries, received a grant of £19,231 to help establish a permanent day-care centre in east-Essex.

Compassion

Happy Hill offers a range of trips and activities to children with special educational needs and disabilities, both in its local hall and out in the community. Provide Community gave Happy Hill a £5,000 donation which will be put towards the purchase of extra buses to enable the charity to continue taking its children on valuable trips and days out.

The Outhouse

One of our charitable donations this year was in aid of Colchester Foodbank. One of our Governor’s, Joelle Leilich, visited the local foodbank to donate a cheque for £5,000 amid the cost-of-living-crisis.

£5,000

The Outhouse, Essex’s only LGBTQ+ charity, which provides a safe space for members of the LGBTQ+ community, received a donation of £2,000 that will contribute towards materials such as posters, brochures, and a self-help kit for young transgender members of the community.

£5,000 £2,000

As an employee-owned social enterprise, we value the voices of our colleagues and listen to their thoughts and opinions when choosing charities and community groups to gift donations. We reached out to over 1,000 colleagues and asked them to nominate local charities, organisations, and support groups that they felt deserved support from a pot of £120,000. After receiving an extensive list of nominations, our Council of Governors selected 30 organisations to benefit from a donation. These member-nominated donations ranged from £500 to £5,000 and covered a diverse range of recipients including St Helena Hospice, Colchester Foodbank, Families in Focus, and Autism Anglia.

Colchester Foodbank

Compassion

£368,466 in Community Grants

This year our community grant-giving initiative gifted a total amount of £368,466 to a variety of local causes. Charities that wished to apply for a grant completed an application form detailing their main aims and activities as an organisation, telling us what a grant would enable them to do. Grants ranged from £3,000 to £20,000 and covered a wide range of charities and community services including Age Well East, MIND in West Essex, Chelmsford Mencap and Halstead Day Centre.

£368,466

Autism Anglia

Nominated by Provide Community’s Learning and Development Administrator Sarah Newman, Autism Anglia delivers outreach programmes and supported living services. The charity also carries out essential training and educational programmes to help educate the public about autism and its common misconceptions. The charity plans to use the £5,000 donation to continue delivering care services to new and existing patients.

BOSP Brighter Opportunities for Special People

Founded by Jodie Connelly, BOSP (Brighter Opportunities for Special People) has been supporting families and changing lives since 1991. The Basildon-based charity provides respite for families with children who are living with complex learning difficulties and terminal illnesses. Joanne Littleson, a Senior Nurse at Provide Community nominated BOSP as her charity after seeing first-hand the fantastic opportunities they offer children. The £2,000 donation will contribute to the delivery of free specialised services that allow disabled children to enjoy fun activities and feel part of their community which is essential for their well-being, whilst giving their parents much-needed respite.

Kool Carers Southeast Limited

Young carers charity, Kool Carers Southeast Limited, received crucial funding from our strategic grant-giving initiative when they applied for a grant of £20,000 to support the mental health and wellbeing of their service users. Founded in 2017 by Rachel Tungate, the charity supports young people aged 8-18 years old, providing them with a safe, professional space in which they can build positive relationships with young people who also share the identity of ‘young carer’. The £20,000 grant will pay for an estimated 600 sessions with a therapist where young carers can talk in an open, non-judgemental space.

Everyone at Provide makes a difference to the communities within which we operate and crucially has a say in how we do this. We all care about making a long-lasting impact on those we work for, and our strategic grants enable us to extend our support beyond the services we deliver.

Mark Heasman, Provide Community Group CEO

Home Start

Essex

Home Start Essex is a network of fully trained volunteers that support families with young children during challenging times. Each year, its centres offer a range of services to over 600 families who are experiencing difficulties with post-natal depression, isolation, bereavement, and many other issues. Volunteers and staff at Home Start have supported over 800 families in the past year alone. The £19,500 grant will allow the charity to continue delivering much-needed support to families with young children who are struggling with the daily challenges they are facing.

Through our Governor donations and community grantgiving initiative, we have been able to help many other local causes including Kids Inspire, Support 4 Sight, CARA (Centre for Action on Rape and Sexual Abuse), Mistley Kids Club, The Peaceful Pony and Halstead Day Centre.

As Chair of the Council of Governors, I feel extremely privileged to be representing our members and playing a role in the team that decides where funding will go. Being a Community Interest Company enables us to go above and beyond our normal health and social care role and seeing the impact of that is truly heartening.

Nicola Yarnall, Chair of the Provide Community Council of Governors

Compassion

Beacon House Ministries

Colchester-based homeless support charity, Beacon House received £20,000 in this year’s community grant-giving initiative. The charity provides a welcoming environment for individuals who are either in insecure accommodation, homeless, or at high risk of becoming homeless. The grant will help Beacon House to carry out its mission of transforming lives – walking together with homeless people on the journey from homelessness to self-fulfilled, independent living. The charity has expanded its services to include a new medical facility and an occupational health team and is now able to reach a wider amount of people, including those who are either sofa surfing, rough sleepers, or in vulnerable accommodation.

Making a Difference Through Volunteering

Every year, Provide Community supports thousands of volunteer hours, enabling and equipping our volunteers to be where they are needed most. Alongside our volunteer programme, every colleague is given two fully paid days a year to volunteer with a charity or community group of their choice.

Lorraine Pendleton, Volunteer Manager, Learning and Development Team and ‘Get into Provide’ Programme Co-ordinator shares a snapshot of our volunteering programmes over the last year.

“During the last year, a number of our volunteers were trained in new roles, supporting many of the outpatient and assessment areas to meet and greet patients, taking temperatures and registering patients for Track and Trace.

As more clinics have re-opened fully across the services, we have more volunteers in Tissue Viability at Braintree Community Hospital and St. Peter’s Hospital in Maldon. The Speech and Language Therapists have also re-started their children’s community clinics and our volunteers have been supporting families during the assessments.

The Virtual Frailty Ward has increasingly used volunteers to support patients in the community. They have requested a wide range of services from de-cluttering and broken furniture removal, to gardening and befriending.

The last year has also seen innovations in recruiting and placing volunteers with the emphasis on getting people in to experience the workplace and encourage people to work for Provide Community and supported living.”

Compassion

New Volunteer Hub

A new volunteer hub is being made ready to welcome new volunteers to St. Peter’s Hospital in Maldon, opening up the opportunity for volunteers to be on-site and deployed in a variety of roles within the hospital. The hub will also act as a volunteer-run teashop for patients, colleagues and visitors, and will support those volunteers who would like the opportunity to learn new skills and gain confidence, including Ukrainian volunteers who wish to practice their English language skills in a work environment.

Volunteer Reservist Programme

Provide Community is part of a new collaborative which is setting up a volunteer reservist programme to roster volunteers, to support hospital and community services during the winter pressures and other difficult periods. Around 200 volunteers will be recruited and trained so they can respond quickly to the needs of the service and patients.

Our 2022 annual Charity Golf Day raised £12,000 for child poverty charity Zarach. The £6,000 raised on the day was match-funded by Provide Community.

£12,000 for child poverty charity Zarach £12,000

Michael Glassock, Service Improvement and Transformation Manager and Vice Chair of the Council of Governors used his volunteering days to support the Care4Calais charity with his Fianceé Jessica Lawrence. The couple travelled to Calais to help the charity with its work supporting more than seven hundred refugees living in and around Calais following the closure of the camps.

Care4Calais

Creating Opportunities with The Prince’s Trust

Our new ‘Get Into Healthcare’ programme with the Prince’s Trust gives young people the opportunity to experience working in the NHS and Social Care in a range of job roles. As a pilot the scheme has been well received and the participants have thoroughly enjoyed the extensive training and opportunities to start a career in health and social care. The programme will run again in 2023.

Collaborating on Tissue Viability Patient Experience

Our patient experience service is designed to ensure our patients are receiving the necessary care and support they require and is delivered by volunteers who are trained in this role.

Compassion

In this pilot, we focused on those who do not use technology but who are actually the main service users. Our volunteers contacted service users by telephone to provide feedback and have a therapeutic conversation. Through this programme, volunteers are able to flag up any problems related to their treatment to the Tissue Viability team to resolve any issues and enhance the whole patient experience.

Get Into Provide

This year we have encouraged more young people to experience life as part of Provide Community. As part of this outreach, we recruited speech and language students to come and gain some real experience volunteering in children’s Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) clinics. One volunteer was so captivated she decided to train as a therapist and applied for a place on the SLT training course to start next year.

Tissue Viability, Dermatology, Lymphoedema Patient Experience

In the last six months, our volunteers have contacted 156 patients for their feedback, and to support any issues. Of 156 patients, eight have asked for more support. During the call, our volunteers also provide a signposting and referral service to other organisations such as hearing apparatus for the home provided free by Hearing Essex which has transformed these patients’ ability to communicate.

What our volunteers say... Compassion

Having had such a great experience of volunteering

I have now successfully signed up with Workforce Solutions and work part-time for Provide. I am also excited about starting the Speech and Language training.

I had become virtually reclusive during Covid and volunteering has allowed me to meet lots of new people and I have really enjoyed the feeling of helping support others.

I have really enjoyed all the opportunities Provide has offered me in terms of accessing training and experience. I am not sure what the future holds for me, but I am really hopeful I can work for Provide and have a career in the NHS.

Rick

What our patientssay... Compassion

The lovely volunteers who greet me at the Leg Ulcer clinic make my day. They make me feel looked after and have a good chat when I am waiting for my transport home. It is one of the few outings I get and although I am having treatment the volunteers and the nurses all make it as happy a time as they can.

Christine (Tissue Viability patient)

My job was a professional gardener before my illness. I was living in a flat then but was stuck because I am permanently in a wheelchair. When I got rehoused, Rick made me some raised beds which were wheelchair height so I could start growing things again.

I don’t know what I would have done without Rick and Barry. They came round cleared out a load of rubbish and took away an old sofa. This meant I could get a new riser recliner in and a new bed. This meant I could get up and moving about again.

Geoff (Virtual Frailty Ward)

Liz (Virtual Frailty Ward)

Achievements Celebrating our Achievements

in Care, Innovation and Compassion

We are immensely proud to have been recognised in a series of regional and national business and industry awards in the last year.

As a Community Interest Company, our purpose is the positive community impact we deliver every day through care, innovation and compassion. These awards enable us to shine a light on our colleagues, partners and volunteers, highlighting and celebrating the significant contributions they make to the communities we serve.

Double Award-Winners in the 2022 Business Culture Awards

Our commitment to, and investment in business culture has enabled us to make a lasting contribution to our people, services and community, celebrated in this supplement.

In October, we joined leading organisations from across the UK for the 2022 Business Culture Awards. The awards recognise forward-thinking organisations in which people’s employment experience is fundamental to business performance. The winning companies have been outstanding in leading with values and have invested in and embedded a healthy business culture that embodies pride, purpose and collaboration.

Against competition from finalists including Bewley Homes, UST and Evora Global, our Group Chief Executive Mark Heasman was awarded the ‘Business Culture Leadership Award.’ He said: “It is an honour to lead an organisation where people make a difference every day. When we talk about culture, it really is the mindset of every Provide Community colleague that makes it happen, and I am so proud of what we do.”

In ‘Best Public/Not-For-Profit Organisation for Business Culture,’ we again faced stiff competition from finalists including Berkshire Healthcare NHS

It is an honour to lead an organisation where people make a difference every day. When we talk about culture, it really is the mindset of every Provide Community colleague that makes it happen, and I am so proud of what we do.

Mark Heasman

Foundation Trust, The Children’s Trust and Westminster City Council before going on to take the title.

Vicky Waldon, Group Chief Commercial Officer said: “Our success as a business is down to the commitment of all of our colleagues in Provide Community to deliver such great services. It’s a great feeling to win. For me it’s the external validation that we are successfully striving to achieve our Vision, Mission and Values through a positive and inclusive culture.

Achievements Winner The 2022 Essex Countywide Business Awards

The Essex Countywide Business Awards Community Award recognises Essex-based organisations who make a significant and lasting impact on the local community through fundraising initiatives, employee wellbeing and operational excellence.

In a category sponsored by Havens Hospices, Provide Community took home the Essex Countywide Community Award in October 2022.

On accepting the award, our Group CEO Mark Heasman said, “Provide Community is a business with an agile mindset that can respond and adapt to the challenges of our sector. It’s an innovative business where we are continually supporting that transformation and investing in ways we can make services more accessible and better for our patients and colleagues.

The amazing contribution made by Provide Community colleagues in community hospitals, clinics, homes and businesses every day reinforces our values of care, innovation and compassion. This award is for every one of you.

Mark Heasman

Health Service Journal Awards, Highly Commended

The Health Service Journal (HSJ) Awards is the most esteemed accolade of healthcare service excellence in the UK. The Awards not only adhere to their 42-year-old values of sharing best practice, improving patient outcomes, and innovating drivers of better service, but shine a light on the outstanding efforts and achievements delivered by teams across the sector.

In November 2021, Provide Community was recognised from hundreds of entries in the HSJ Awards, winning Highly Commended in the Primary Care Networks, GP or Community Provider of the Year category. The award recognised our contribution across all services during one of the most challenging periods for the health service in recent history.

HSJ editor Alastair McLellan said “I’d like to offer my congratulations to Provide. It is always inspirational to see projects adapting, developing and improving their services to provide innovative, effective treatments for patients across the country. We believe Provide really holds the value of the HSJ Awards – in terms of sharing best practice, improving patient outcomes, and demonstrating innovation - at the centre of what they do.”

Provide Community is also shortlisted in the 2022 HSJ Awards for the ‘Driving Efficiency Through Technology’ award.

We believe Provide really holds the value of the HSJ Awards – in terms of sharing best practice, improving patient outcomes, and demonstrating innovation - at the centre of what they do

Health Service Journal editor Alastair McLellan

www.provide.org.uk