Edberts House: Sarah Gorman

Sarah Gorman is the chief executive of Edberts House, a community charity in Gateshead.

In October 2018, Power to Change awarded Edberts House a £60,537 health and social care development grant to expand its Community Link Workers, a social prescribing scheme that provides holistic care in the community, to five GP surgeries.

By September 2019, the service had expanded to 13 surgeries, and are set to sign contracts to 29 surgeries covering the whole borough. The contracts provide a management fee that can be reinvested in the essential infrastructure of the charity.

What does Edberts do?
We started life as a community development charity on one estate in East Gateshead where there are historically high levels of deprivation, working with local people to tackle the issues that they are facing.

In our area there is 45 per cent child poverty, lots of families living with complex issues, high levels of unemployment – but also incredibly vibrant communities where people have lived for a long time. There are rich relationships and a sense of belonging. People have more community in those estates than I experienced when growing up in my middle class community in London!

At Edberts House we provide a connecting space so people can come together.

What is the point of the project?
We started to work with a lot of people through our two community hubs – we’re about the launch a third.

The People’s Health Trust were looking to fund work to address health inequalities rooted in specific geographical areas, so they approached us and asked whether we would be interested in becoming one of their “Local Conversation” areas, part of a people-led funding programme.

Through that work we started to think around the wider determinants of health. Where people live, how they live, their sense of home, aspirations and belonging are at the root of everything. If we can bring people back that then their physical health improves.

People come in with all sorts of issues and we were able to help them in one way or another.

Have a look to learn more about our Community Linking Project https://t.co/QwVpGvlTzg https://t.co/75eevdMQ0j

— Edberts House (@EdbertsHouse) October 13, 2017

We hadn’t thought of ourselves as a health charity, but when we went to talk to GPs they said that because of our work a lot of people weren’t coming in so often and when they did come in they were more articulate.

So around 2015 we started to talk to a local practice manager about doing something more formal, to access the patients that would really benefit. We joint-funded a pilot – we paid half and the GPs paid half.

We didn’t want to put any criteria on it. Health services are often accessed through complicated eligibility criteria. We felt it was important to understand people, not assess people. We helped people with problems like housing and debt by walking shoulder to shoulder with people, not just handing them a leaflet.

At the end of the year, the other GPs in the area said they would like to have the service, so now we’re in 13 surgeries and shortly will expand across the whole of Gateshead, accessing social prescribing funding which was made available from July by NHS England.

Our worker becomes part of the GP practice team.

People will go to the GP and maybe say they are struggling with anxiety or stress, or maybe another physical symptom, but they may also talk to the GP about non-clinical issues that could be causing it. It may be that they are struggling with housing or their children won’t go to school. In our area, we had one of the highest levels of antidepressant prescribing in the country. The GPs want to help, but they don’t have the capacity or the time, so they will refer them to our worker. 

The People’s Health Trust were looking to fund work to address health inequalities rooted in specific geographical areas, so they approached us and asked whether we would be interested in becoming one of their “Local Conversation” areas, part of a people-led funding programme. Through that work we started to think around the wider determinants of health. Where people live, how they live, their sense of home, aspirations and belonging are at the root of everything. If we can bring people back that then their physical health improves.

When was the moment you decided to do this?

For me it’s been a really interesting journey. I started on my own in 2010, knocking on doors and starting my own women’s group, to now having a team of 20 and recruiting more.

It’s been a big change for me, learning how to manage that. We have tried to have within our organisation a culture of care and love and belonging without a strong hierarchical structure. If you can’t do that for one another, what have you got to offer for outside? I like to think that we have a family atmosphere. 

What’s next?

A group of residents came to us from a local estate that had high levels of antisocial behaviour, where high numbers of young people are supported by social services. They came to see our hubs and they said we would love to do something like that on their estate. 

Meanwhile we had reflected on the families we were supporting who often struggled as they had to go to so many different places and speak to so many people to get the help they needed.  One family had 63 professionals involved with them!  

We started to talk to the different agencies in Gateshead: Local Authority, Housing, Police, Citizens Advice, GPs about how we could do things differently.  And we decided to try it out on the new estate – led by the local people who wanted to bring about change.

We all worked together for about a year, talking about what to do, and in March we got this big lottery grant of £838,000 over five years, matched with £1.2 million from all the partners. 

We have capital funding to create a three-story hub, but that won’t be ready till next Easter so we will be based in the school temporarily and then we will move the bulk of the work to the hub when it is built.

Support agencies will be based together in the heart of the community and there will be a roundtable discussions, based in the hub, which says something important about the power balance. There will be lunch groups and fun days to bring people together and build that sense of community.

What’s been your proudest moment so far?

For me it’s the individual stories. A guy called Ian who was in a bad way and didn’t have anywhere to live was so moved by the support that he’s received and how much that’s meant to him. I still sometimes feel like crying when I watch the video. 

One of our team had come back this week from seeing a man who hadn’t had any money for eight months and she managed to get him higher rate and all the pay backdated.

She looks delighted and he looks delighted. You see people who are so downtrodden by the system, awful stories about how people are treated, it’s great to be able to do something about that.

What’s been the hardest?

The constant challenge is the funding.

You can see what needs to be built – long term relationships with sustained funding over a number of years – but you get six months for this and six months for that.

Everyone that comes over says this is great, how would the area survive without it? And yet we struggle for funding. That’s a frustration. 

Where has funding come from?

We have a real patchwork of funding, right from the beginning.

When I began we had five months left in the bank, a few thousand left, so I started getting grants for activities and as the impact of the work became obvious some places were interested in supporting us longer term. 

The Tudor Trust, People’s Health Trust and Virgin Money Foundation have been major funders. Power to Change have funded us to develop the community linking work and that came at a good time, when the opportunity for expansion came about.

Through using our community development experience to develop our service in the NHS, we had hoped some of the infrastructure funding would help our hubs to continue. We were 95% grant reliant – we have moved away from this through the new contracts we have secured, and would love to generate more earned income to become more self-sustaining.

Will Brexit affect what you are doing?

I don’t know. What I find interesting is the wider issues.

In our communities, Brexit is all very well but if you can’t feed your kids in the holidays, do you care?

Sunderland down the road from us was a very strong vote for leaving, but largely because people felt ignored and no one was doing anything about it. 

It will be interesting to see if Brexit will impact on the NHS, as we’re getting significant funding for the social prescribing work, as their focus moves more towards personalised care and prevention. 

What would you say to someone looking to do something similar? 

I would encourage them to do it – we would love to talk to them and offer support.  

Locally based organisations, embedded in communities, can transform an area, and give people hope and aspiration, and I would love to see that replicated in as many areas as possible.