Steve Remington – Business Manager for Locala Community Partnerships, Eve Remington – Practice Lead for Parenting and Children Centre Offer within Bradford Social Care

Steve: “Locala is a not-for-profit social enterprise providing a variety of NHS community healthcare services to people in Kirklees, Calderdale and Bradford. I run a projects team that looks at service models, and identifies how we can ensure the best patient outcomes, and whether we can be more efficient in what we do. Lately we’ve also had to look at how we can adapt traditional models of working, which has involved video consultation and digitalisation of processes.
Some of the projects my team had beforehand were around efficiencies and we sometimes faced a challenge to prove efficiencies. The current situation has been taken out of our hands and we’ve had to do something different, which is expediting the process.
I’m working from home, alongside many colleagues. We were able to mobilise our workforce very quickly as we are a digital ready workforce.
I have been paperless for years, so it’s not been a big transition for me, the only difference being that whereas I’d have face to face meetings, we’ve been doing that via Skype. One of the main positives is I haven’t had to commute!”

Eve: “My role is to make sure parents and children get access to parenting programmes that are high quality, effective and improve their outcomes in life. We normally run face to face programmes every single day and we can have anything up to 40 groups running per term across the whole of the Bradford district. Obviously we can’t do face to face groups any more so it’s been a huge change for us in the way we deliver, the way we engage with families and how we see the children that we are working with. So we have had to move everything digitally which has been a huge task and we’ve also been doing a lot of one to one parenting on the phone instead. Some of the worries, however, are that some families haven’t got access to technology, some aren’t confident to do so and a lot of them don’t want to be seen on a video or haven’t got access to a laptop or ipad or tablet – so it’s been quite difficult to reach those families. Also, with children being at home, doing a 2 hour parenting course for 12 weeks has been hard work for some of those families and for us to be able to engage with them we’ve been working around the clock and changed our working hours to be completely flexible and we do sessions late at night when the children are in bed and the families can access the services – we’re signposting to online courses so they don’t have to have a video call or phone call and can do it completely in their own time. So its massively changed the way we deliver our services - definitely some positives to that but also some worries for some who can’t access it in this whole new world.”

21.5.20