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NewsJune 30th, 2015
It’s the second day of profiling the shorlisted entries for this year’s Bevan Prize for Health and Wellbeing. Today we’re looking at the work of finalists Steve Cottrell and the In It Together team at Public Health Wales.
Steve Cottrell
Finalist – Individual Category
Steve Cottrell is a mental health nurse based in North Wales who has developed several internet-based self-help programmes for people with stress, anxiety, phobias and panic attacks.
Beginning in 2002, Steve started sharing his ‘Outreach-Online’ progamme with his patients, and it went on to win the Welsh Innovations in Healthcare award in 2006. Since then, it has morphed and adapted into the Serenity Programme which currently has more than 80,000 users worldwide and draws in another 100 new users each day.
Steve said: “There are private companies with far greater resources than my own at their disposal, some of whom charge £100 per treatment. Why price an invention out of the reach of many users, or limit its deployment through ‘cost per case’ pricing, when the strength of the internet is the way in which it can help democratise healthcare? The Serenity Programme widens access to people who, by reason of choice, disability or lifestyle may not visit mental health premises or avail themselves of a service.
We now have an infrastructure, involving both the NHS and third sector, delivering the Programme to people with the early symptoms of stress, depression, or anxiety. Instantaneous machine translation converts the Programme into over 80 languages, while a ‘stepped’ approach enables people to access the low-intensity part of the Programme immediately with no login or personal details required.”
To find out more about Steve Cottrell’s work, please click here.
In It Together
Finalist – Organisation Category
The ‘In It Together’ transgender awareness project began around two years ago when Public Health Wales’s Screening Engagement Team was approached by members of the transgender community with concerns about access to screening.
Transgender service users highlighted their mixed experiences of screening services, including confusion over who should be invited for screening and the poor availability of information and communication with services users.
The In It Together team recognised that this needed to be addressed and devised an action plan with the primary aim to improve the service provision for transgender people in Wales. They have worked alongside transgender service users and partners to improve service delivery and accessibility though a number of resources including leaflets, training and digital stories.
These resources were officially launched by Vaughan Gething AM, Deputy Health Minister, in October 2014 and were widely welcomed by service users and providers.
The team said: “Our work has had multiple benefits for service users and partners, as well as our organisation. It demonstrates excellent partnership working and adopts the fundamental principles of prudent healthcare which can only strengthen relationships between screening and transgender service users and partners.”
Learn more about the In It Together team here.
The 2015 Bevan Prize for Health and Wellbeing is sponsored by:
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