Bright Diamonds

Heather talks to Hazel Stuteley OBE who is a retired health visitor from Cornwall and some of the community leaders from the Beacon Community Regeneration Partnership and Townstal Community Partnership. During the 1990’s Hazel and her fellow health visitor Phil Trenoweth led some multi-award-winning community engagement work in the Beacon Estate, near Falmouth in Cornwall. But she didn’t stop there and has now worked alongside a total of eight vulnerable communities across the UK over the last 10 years to empower residents to successfully transform their communities and in doing so, make huge improvements in things like unemployment, crime and children’s education. Hazel’s work clearly illustrates that nurses, health visitors and midwives can lead some remarkable changes. She will also draw out why she, as a health visitor, felt compelled to act and why she thinks her leadership was so well accepted by those around her. The importance of Hazel’s work is that the successes she has led have now been analysed and developed into a series of clear steps which are now enabling local councils, NHS partners and others across the country to make Big Society a reality. See www.healthcomplexity.net for more on Connecting Communities Length 26 min 37 sec Music written and recorded by Peter Cook, author, business consultant at the Academy of Rock www.academy-of-rock.co.uk

John Wharton, formerly a district nursing co-ordinator at NHS Warrington, describes how he redesigned the local anticoagulant service by bringing it into the community. The key features described are: Stakeholder engagement and management A patient focused redesign A description of the strengths of nursing, using key skills including understanding the patient journey, negotiation, empathy, relationship building and gaining trust