Voice of BME Trafford have been in some exciting partnerships recently and one of them is the Trafford’s MAPLE partnership aimed at prevention and wellbeing in the borough, commissioned by Public Health Trafford. The aim of the partnership is to work in collaboration to achieve:

• Mental health improvement
• Active aging
• Preventing ill health
• Learning Disability and Autism Support
• Engaging with BME communities

We have been partnered with since March 2017 and our work focuses on the Public Health priorities. This partnership consists of 9 organisations working on ‘prevention and early intervention agenda and has been overseen by our lead partner, Age UK Trafford. VBMET has been contributing to Public Health’s priorities by promoting NHS Health screenings and health checks, this is a very important and needed programme that meets our health agenda priorities for the Trafford community. With this intervention we have successfully booked 611 screenings since March 2017 to Dec 2018.

We also as part of our Maple project work with four Trafford Medical Practices helping them to achieve their national target of screening. To achieve this, a dual approach has been adopted, that is we, work closely with the medical practices and build on outreaching into the community by holding regular and engaging community events.

We also hold regular community events under the banner of ‘Live well, live longer 50+ Club’ this health initiative event promotes strong healthy life style changes for improved wellbeing. In addition to this, we have designated ‘Health Mentors’ that provide a service that supports one to one dialogue and encouraged support for our BME Trafford communities.

We have now included the appointment of a BME Male engagement worker to support the engagement with BME men in the community hence, promoting health screening (including AAA screening) and healthy lifestyles amongst 50+ males too!