Black All Year
Black History Month plays a crucial role, but it's essential to acknowledge that the celebration of Black heritage and culture extends beyond just one month. It's a year-round commitment involving celebration, recognition, support, education, and advocacy. Hosting this podcast is Steph Edusei, a renowned leader, speaker, and coach. As an Ashanti-Geordie woman with mixed Ghanaian and English roots from the North East of England, she brings a unique perspective to the table.
Black All Year
Black All Year - Saving Lives, Building Trust
In this inspiring episode of Black All Year, Steph Edusei sits down with Loveness Scott, the Positive Action Lead at the North East Ambulance Service and Vice Chair of the National Ambulance BME Forum. With a deep commitment to race equity and community wellbeing, Loveness shares her inspiring journey from answering 111 calls during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to leading initiatives that have doubled the representation of ethnically minoritised staff in the North East Ambulance Service.
Loveness discusses the life-saving importance of diversity in emergency services, the challenges faced by underrepresented communities in accessing healthcare, and how tailored recruitment strategies can make a significant impact. She also sheds light on the vital role of culturally competent care, and how simple yet effective education can bridge the knowledge gap that puts lives at risk.
Whether you're involved in recruitment, community outreach, or simply passionate about equality and healthcare, this episode is packed with insights that could make a real difference in your life or the life of a loved one.
Listen to learn how small actions can lead to big changes, and why representation truly matters in life-or-death situations.
Loveness Scott's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/loveness-scott-msc-58b4521ba/
North East Ambulance Service https://www.neas.nhs.uk/
Steph Edusei LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/steph-edusei/
Steph Edusei Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stephedusei/
Original music by Wayne C McDonald, #ActorSlashDJ
www.facebook.com/waynecmcdonald
www.mixcloud.com/waynecmcdonald
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Hi everyone. I'm Steffa Ducey and this is Black All Year. Today's guest is Loveness Scott Loveness is Positive Action Lead at the North East Ambulance Service and she's also Vice Chair of the National Ambulance BME Forum. Loveness also has an MSc in Development Management from the Open University. Now, this episode is for you no matter what, but it's particularly for you if you work in recruitment or in community outreach, but even more so if you're a member of the ethnically minoritised community, because Because, if you are, there is information coming up that could save the life of you or a loved one. Enjoy, hi, loveness. Welcome to Black All Year. It's really lovely to see you. I'd love to start with you just telling us a little bit about you, who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Hi, steph, thank you for having me on this podcast. As I say, my name is Loveness Scott and first and foremost I am a mum. I am a proud mum of two boys and a little girl who's 15. I'll say little 15 is no longer little. But I am also a work within the EDI team in the North Istanbul service, so I am a positive action lead and my work take me into the communities across the region of the North East where I'm heavily involved in health inequalities, so understanding the barriers that our communities face when they're accessing our services and teaching people just life-saving skills and just learning more really about our communities within the region. Outside work, I would say I'm probably more passionate about race equality in general and just the well-being of people and just hoping that everybody that I meet has that feeling of belonging in whatever setting we are in. So that's just me in a nutshell there.
Speaker 1:Lovely. And how did you get into that? Because I don't know anybody. I can't imagine many people sit in school and go. I want to be an ADI worker. So how did you end up? What took you to that point?
Speaker 2:So this was actually an accidental kind of pathway for me job-wise. When COVID hit in 2020, I was actively looking for work, but in the charity sector. I was just finishing my master's degree and I had mastered in development management. So, understanding people's behaviors, culture, values, conflict resolution, poverty eradication, that kind of stuff is what I was interested in. And then COVID happened and my interviews were paused. So I thought I'll take on a temporary role with the ambulance service, answering one-on-one calls. And, as we know, COVID didn't just last three months, like everybody expected. So I ended up with a permanent contract as a health advisor and within a few months of doing that role, my job got advertised and I was really not confident applying for it. At the time I had these kind of thoughts I'm still new, I still don't know the organisation well, am I the right person? A little bit of imposter syndrome. But yes, I did go for it and I got the job.
Speaker 1:Great, and it must have been interesting for you working in that environment in the call centre, first of all dealing with at that time of COVID dealing with patients and doing were you just 111 or did you do 999 as well?
Speaker 2:At the time I was only trained on 111, but every now and then a call can come through that ends up being a 999. So, yes, I was more 111, but I did take a few 999 calls.
Speaker 1:And I can imagine that people would be very concerned at that point. You know the early days of COVID where people would be ringing quite a lot for that help, that support, that advice. And we think back to then there was no testing, so you didn't know if you had COVID, did you? It was just I've got these symptoms and all we heard was you get symptoms, you end up in hospital and there's a fair chance you're going to dieized backgrounds because I think at the time the news was very clear that people of ethnic minorities were at a higher risk.
Speaker 2:So that made people really scared, really worried, and we've seen people who never used the service beginning to use that service because there was nowhere else to get the answers. Doctors were not opening and people wanted to know what's going on. Are they going to die? What can they do? So, yeah, it was a really really worrying time for everybody.
Speaker 1:I'm just wondering because, for somebody, I can imagine if I was calling up from a position of no knowledge and I did come from an ethically minoritised background and then having you on the phone because you do have an accent, that would actually bring me some comfort in hearing that and thinking, oh, it's somebody who's going to understand, it's somebody I can trust. And it is strange, isn't it? They wouldn't know you, but they would hear you and go oh, okay, that's one less thing I have to worry about yeah, it really did, steph, it was.
Speaker 2:I think that was probably my first awakening call and it has informed a lot of the work that I do now.
Speaker 2:So so now, as part of my everyday life, I am passionate about encouraging more people from the ethnic communities to apply for jobs within the ambulance service, because what I learned then was the importance of making that phone call and somebody who sounds like you answers the phone.
Speaker 2:It made me think how important it would be when you phone for an ambulance and that at that time of panic the person who turns up at your door looks like you as well. So I've spent the last three years working closely to our recruitment team, running recruitment workshops that are targeted to ethnically minoritized communities, and as part of that and other kind of activities we've done within the organizations, we've managed to double the people we have in the organization who identify as ethnic minority, and to me that is a small win, but there is still a lot that we can do. It's always encouraging. Now, three years ago I was the only person with an accent on the phone, and now there's quite a few around. So, yeah, it would be nice to have kind of much demographics of the region and know that maybe every other call might just have that accent.
Speaker 1:that can just feel like home yeah it's a really interesting one, and I think being able to say that you have doubled the workforce numbers is amazing. I know, having worked for the ambulance service in the past, that that's actually. It is a very low base, which is why you're being critical of yourself. It's a low base, but you've still doubled it and that's impressive, because I left the ambulance service back in 2012 and we were trying to do something about it then with very little impact. So you, you've made a difference there and that is huge. What, what is it that you've done? You think that has has made that difference?
Speaker 1:I was talking on an earlier podcast about one of the challenges that the ambulance service has, particularly for the frontline services, because people go. Well, the ambulance service you're just drivers. If you don't understand, communities quite often think the ambulance service is just drivers. So if you want to be a professional, a healthcare professional, you're not going to go and be a driver. If you want to be a driver, why would you not be a taxi driver? Because you'll make more money. So what is it that you've done to really change that view and to bring people in?
Speaker 2:I don't think it's a matter of changing the view. It's a matter of understanding what our communities want, and I think as an organisation, we have got a habit of wanting communities to come to us and find out information. Wanting communities to come to us and find out information. What I do is I go out and find out what they want and then make my offer or tailor my offer to fit in with that. So if I was in the community and I'm speaking to a mom who wants their daughter to go into recruitment, that's absolutely amazing. But did you know that the ambulance service has got a recruitment team as well? Because we are not recruiting to tick numbers or to put people in the front line so our pictures look pretty. We are recruiting to make an organization-wide impact. So for me, it does not matter which part of the organization you work in if that's what you're passionate about, because that's the only way we can keep the people if they're coming in to do the jobs that they love, the jobs that they've trained for to begin with. So I am really big in talking around all the jobs that we have and I've got a page full of those job titles that people don't realize. You know our ambulances need mechanics to fix. They need tire fitters. Are you a cleaner? Yeah, we've got offices that we clean and our ambulances want to be cleaned as well after a shift.
Speaker 2:You know you like talking. Like me, you can do community engagement and spend the day talking to people. So what is it that drives you on a daily basis? Previously, talking on the ambulance sector, I had applied for another public sector organization and they were passionate in putting me in the front. Like this is a job that we really wanted to look into and it wasn't something I was passionate about.
Speaker 2:So to me then that becomes a ticky box exercise. So I think that's something that's really been important to me. When I talk to people, what is it? We've got people who've traveled to the UK or moved to the UK from different parts of the world, and my question is always what did you do back home? I was a teacher. Okay, maybe we don't have teachers in the ambulance service, but we've got a training school, you know. So it's a transferable skill. So actually you can join us and go into the training school and use those skills that you've learned back home and that it makes sense to that person you're speaking to and I loved what you said there about.
Speaker 1:It's not about what you say, it's about almost what you hear. It's about understanding and connecting with people and understanding what people want and what they need, and I think that's something that we do lose sight of a lot, and I think you're spot on. It's not just the ambulance service and it's not just the NHS service and it's not just the NHS. There's a lot of organizations and companies that think, well, we want to speak to X community, so let's put on a community event and they'll come to us and to me.
Speaker 2:That there's such arrogance in that, isn't it of thinking that they're going to think, oh, the ambulance service wants to talk to us, so I'll give up my time and I will travel to there so that I can give them the benefit of my wisdom yeah it's really quite an arrogant approach, so I love that you're doing it differently and going out to communities one of my first few community meetings was with a guy I'm sure he won't mind me saying his name, he's called John and he works in the community in Middlesbrough and when we were having a conversation he said something that really stood out right earlier on within my journey with the ambulance service where he says you know, the government, the NHS, all organisations are referring to us as hard-to-reach communities. But we've always been here. Nobody's asked us to come and sit at the table. They detect what we should be doing. Nobody comes and sits down with us and talks to us and then they say we're hard-to-reach.
Speaker 2:And that really kind of resonated with that statement a lot and I thought I don't want to be in the community and look like I'm just parachuting in to just take what I need and then boom, I'm gone again and they'll see me in another four years when I've got another piece of survey or another piece of project that needs involvement of different groups. So I have tried to have meaningful relationships with the communities that I work with and get a really clear understanding of what is it that particular community want and how can I leave meaningful help with that community, and it's allowed us to keep getting invited back and back again because we were doing things different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that term, hard to reach is awful, it's horrendous.
Speaker 2:It really really is horrendous yeah.
Speaker 1:It's. It's something that's used a lot. You're right, hard to reach and some people now say seldom heard heard.
Speaker 1:I actually preferred seldom listened to, absolutely. It's not that people don't hear, they just don't listen and you kind of go as, as John said to you, we're here, we've always been here. Why, why are we so hard to reach? Just come and talk with us. But that's the truth. It's that people don't think about the ways in which they do things. You wouldn't go to somebody who is deaf and talk to them without an interpreter, but what you do is with some communities, is you just put out blanket communications and expect that that is going to fall into the laps of the people that you want it to get to, even though they don't use those blanket routes and things like that?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think it's that, as I say, I much prefer the term seldom listened to and at the time, if you remember, steph, at the beginning of COVID, the NHS as a whole, we were sending out messages on Twitter, emails, sometimes Facebook, but actually we know that quite a lot of communities were not using these platforms as their source of information. They were using their community WhatsApp groups, their community mosques or churches or community groups and we were not going there. We were putting things on Twitter and say tick, we've sent that message out. People will find it when they want it. And people did not know.
Speaker 2:So once we change and ask people how do you want to hear from us? How can we get this information to you? So as a result of that that, we recruited volunteers from the communities and they became like our ears and eyes in terms of listening to what's going on and bringing back feedback. But taking information from us and just in bite sizes and just disseminating it in the communities and coming back and say this is not working working. So over the three years I've managed to recruit 128 volunteers in the community and they've absolutely been the life of the programme and they drive the work that we do with such passion and such dedication and it's an absolute honour to work with all those individuals.
Speaker 1:And it's so important, isn't it, to have people who are from communities, whether they be volunteers or staff? I think it's that thing of I remember having a conversation about older people and the use of technology and people were saying, oh well, older people, they don't use technology and we can't think. And I pointed out the fact that all of my black African uncles used WhatsApp and were very connected because that's how they connected with home. So to say, oh, this won't work for older people. It may not work for some older people, but within certain communities, like people who've come from other countries, things like WhatsApp are massively used and the WhatsApp groups and things like that.
Speaker 1:Ethnically minoritized communities were using those groups long before anybody else was, because it was a free way of communicating with people from wherever they were. And yet that wouldn't be known by people unless they have staff or volunteers from within those communities. So that importance of it's not just about having somebody who's working with you, because because they can, they can do something, as in be that voice on the end of the phone. It's also about what, the knowledge that they're bringing into the organisation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we've learned so much about these people's cultures as well through the volunteers, because they are very proud, and I'm going on about them because it's Volunteer Week and yesterday we had our volunteer award. So I had a team of 18 attend in their uniforms and everybody every senior manager who was in the room said we had such visibility and such vibrancy because, you know, we, our people, are not shy. We walk in holding our heads high in a room full of really senior people, you know, with the biggest smiles and biggest laughs in the room, and they just brought such life into the room and so many of them were recognised for their hard work as well. So that's something that's quite important to me as well.
Speaker 1:It is one of the big, the big things about diversity that I think we sometimes overlook. I, I love the difference, I love learning about different cultures, learning about different traditions and beliefs, and it just makes life so much more interesting. And I think we forget about that sometimes when we're talking about business or whatever we think about but what can they do for the business? And we forget about the fact that it just makes life more interesting having difference in the room.
Speaker 2:It does, it does. And that different voice sometimes is just what you were missing in your strategy or in your piece of work just hearing just a different way of doing that same thing. So, yeah, we are very lucky in that way Great and the work that you're doing is.
Speaker 1:Is that about health education as well, or is it purely about that kind of connecting and bringing people into the ambulance service?
Speaker 2:it's got a dual role it's mainly raising awareness of what we do in the ambulance service, and I'm sure you'll agree with me that in the nhs we are really great at putting out things in place to help people, but we generally don't tell the people about what we've done, so people never find out and people would be complaining. We go, but we've got this in place to help people, but we generally don't tell the people about what we've done, so people would never find out and people would be complaining. We go, but we've got this in place, why are you not using it? So what we wanted our volunteers to do is know about the ambulance service, know the difference between 111 and 999, but also help people navigate that complex health system that we have. For example, we have interpreters on all our phone lines and these are free of charge, available 24-7. And ours absolutely gobsmacked the number of people in the community who did not know that when I started. Again, that's another number that we've managed to increase by a third, so the number of people on a yearly basis who are using the telephone interpreters, and that's really reassuring for us because we know that people then are using the service and it's not the same kind of languages every year that they change at the top. So we know there are more people, new people, learning about this service, that are using it.
Speaker 2:We also teach life-saving skills and I always tell a story about where I come from. I'm from Zimbabwe and in my culture, whenever there is an incident, if somebody wants to collapse, women will start crying and screaming and panicking, men start praying or, you know, worshipping their ancestors. Nobody thinks about let's ring an ambulance or let's do CPR. We don't even know what CPR is and I used to always tell the story when I went out in the communities and people started telling me their stories, what they do in their cultures. Oh, oh no, we wrap onions on their nose because if they start sneezing, we know they're alive. Some cultures they pour water on them.
Speaker 2:So we have this kind of lighthearted conversation and then I say do you know what? There is another way. Then I bring the concept of the chain of survival. I demonstrate CPR and how to use a defibrillator and you can see that light bulb moment is instant, where people really realize actually how many people have we lost, that we could have saved their lives, and that's something that's invaluable, because we know life is precious. It doesn't matter whether they're black white. So I really love delivering those workshops and making sure people a they know where to go to for help and they know how to use that service, but also they know what to do at home while they're waiting for that ambulance that's so important, isn't it?
Speaker 1:we again? I think in the UK people assume because we've had the NHS for 70 plus years however long it is now and we've had that health education, cpr I think I've known about that almost as long as I've been alive, and I've been alive for quite a long time now but we forget the fact that in some countries there isn't such a thing as an ambulance service and even if there is, it doesn't operate in the same way that ours does. So that whole concept of when this happens you call 999 and people will come to help you or there is something that I can do, is completely alien. And just that simple thing of going out and teaching communities simple thing of going out and teaching communities, as you say, it can make such a massive difference. But that is a knowledge gap there that is just overlooked. It's completely overlooked and is damaging our communities because they're not getting that basic first aid, basic life support, training and expertise that many, many others do.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think as well. We are quite good within the NHS in sharing these scary figures. You know, data is telling us that ethnic minority people are more likely to die of cardiovascular disease, but we don't explain why and people just hear these big numbers and big statements that are scary. During COVID we had the same. You know, people are more likely to die of COVID. There's no background information and people just end up having this belief that we're just a cursed kind of race.
Speaker 2:You know why do we always have all these bad things happening to us? But actually it's really simple, it's knowledge, things happening to us, but actually it's really simple, it's knowledge. We haven't got that knowledge to make those right changes or right interventions in the community. And to me, just being able to design that intervention and deliver it and see it making a difference into people's lives, it's really, really interesting and I even see it as a gift in so many ways because I will always wonder for the rest of my life how many people have I taught who have used those skills to save their life? I'll never know, but it's just an interesting thought to have.
Speaker 1:It is. Thank you, loveness. Just that last thing that we've been talking about there. That is a whole other subject in itself and maybe we'll have to have another discussion, because there is there is a theory that some of this is not accidental, that people are aren't taught things, but I think the work that you're doing is fantastic. It's wonderful to hear the difference that you're making in the Advent service. My heart sinks a little bit because a lot of the things that you're describing, some of the challenges that you're describing that you're tackling, were things that we knew about 12 years ago and weren't tackled at that point. But it's wonderful that you are there and that you're doing the work that you're doing. So please keep it up, thank you, thank you, and thank you so much again for speaking with us.
Speaker 2:Thank you, steph, thank you.
Speaker 1:I hope you've enjoyed that episode of Black All Year. It would be great if you could subscribe and review, because not only will it make sure that you get the content, but it will help other people to find it too. Take care.
