Frontline care workers to be trained to help tackle health and wellbeing concerns

Engagement: volunteers will receive training alongside NHS and council staff. Photograph: RVS

Plans are afoot to train up frontline care workers in preventative medicine as well as other health and wellbeing issues.

Councillors on the Health in Hackney Scrutiny Commission were told about the new training programme at its meeting yesterday evening(24 July).

The training, known as Making Every Contact Count (MECC), is a means of encouraging staff across the NHS, local authorities, and voluntary and community sector (VCS) to opportunistically engage people in conversations about their health and wellbeing.

Jayne Taylor, Consultant in Public Health and Workstream Director for Prevention, said: “We want frontline staff to be trained to identify things like debt problems or lack of exercise, and then be able to raise the issue sensitively and appropriately.

“Social care workers we have spoken to have jumped on this, so there is both the opportunity and ambition to make it work.”

Acknowledging the busy workloads of frontline staff, the briefing emphasised that a MECC intervention is intended to take ‘a matter of minutes’.

MECC training will be funded for both programme management and ICT support by the Prevention workstream of City & Hackney’s Integrated Commissioning Board.

The Prevention workstream intends to submit a business case to the Community Education Provider Network (CEPN) for a bespoke training programme for frontline staff across the NHS, local authorities and VCS.