This service review sought to find out why Ethnic Minorities were under represented or not represented at all in the services that the chaplaincy department seeks to offer under Compassionate Communities (CoCo). Compassionate Communities is an initiative by the Chaplaincy Department at UHCW NHS Trust to extend the support services that Chaplains and Chaplaincy volunteers given to patients in terms pastoral care when they are inpatients in our hospitals and extend the same to them when they are in the community, especially those patients that have complex healthcare needs or have a terminal illness. From the current support groups run by CoCo like RIPPLE and TAB it was quite apparent that Ethnic Minorities were underrepresented. This Service Review (study) adopted the narrative as a method of data collection. The results from the narratives collected were never meant to be representative but just a survey of how the participants viewed the CoCo initiative. The findings show that the overwhelming majority of the participants did not know about the initiative except one that had seen a flier somewhere. Findings show that there need to rethink how such initiatives should publicised, it was also discovered that there in greater need to work with the researched community in order to find out what their real needs are as opposed to the ‘perceived needs’. Related to issue of perceived needs, some interest groups felt that the services that CoCo offered were a duplication of services already offered in the community.
Published Date: 2022-07-26; Received Date: 2022-06-28
