Community Projects

If you know of any projects we may be able to help with, please get in touch!

At The Grantham, we know good healthcare does not begin and end within our surgery building. We are always interested in ways we can help support our diverse and exciting community.

Did you know at the last count we have 66 different nationalities registered with us!

The Grantham Practice Portuguese Partnership project

The Grantham is proud to be a part of a fast evolving and innovative project that looks at how we as a GP in the community can better work with other Lambeth based organisations (housing, education, charities, social) to address inequalities of health in the population. This started in 2013 when we invited over a Portuguese GP from Lisbon - Dr Cristiano Figueiredo – to help us run focus groups and surveys at the Portuguese Speaking Community Centre.

Improving the Health of Lambeth

We wanted to understand better the frustrations and barriers to good health care that come about due to differences in language and culture. This was the start of an adventure that continues today and has us partnering with a wide variety of passionate community members working together to improve the health of the Lambeth population… (read more)

The Portuguese Community Project came out of observational and emerging evidence that Portuguese speaking patients in Lambeth suffered from worse outcomes in Diabetes, Blood pressure, A&E attendances and disjointed care.

Engaging the Community to Guide us

The key to this project was to build a community led intervention program. To do this we needed to build bridges with the local Portuguese speaking community, gain trust, be relevant and also be visible within it.

We ran an ‘NHS’ day in the community, in Portuguese, led by a Portuguese clinician who worked in the Portuguese health system – one that the audience would have grown up in and be used to. The insights this revealed and the trust we gained from this helped us come up with a variety of ideas in ways we could improve patient health.

What we started to do to help

With the support of the NHS Lambeth Local Care Network (a forum of various Lambeth based health and social organisations) we quickly gathered expertise and perspectives that enriched our program and we started to develop interventions that included:

• A welcome pack to the NHS in Portuguese explaining how to register, community services, routine health calls and more…
• Availability of patient education leaflets in Portuguese at all GP surgeries in Lambeth
• Health Education videos to be shown on social media and in GP surgeries starting with one that explains how to carry out the home kit for bowel cancer screening
• Breakfast club in a Portuguese café on South Lambeth Road providing healthy food and homework support for Children from Wyvill School.
• Peer support group for women suffering from depression with added support for those suffering domestic violence.

Getting more Partners involved

In December 2016, with the support of the Health Foundry, we ran an event attended by various community members, organisations, the now Deputy Lambeth Mayor (Cllr Guilherme Rosa) and the Portuguese Consulate (Joana Gaspar) to start to develop the idea around formalising this exciting new network which was being formed of passionate individuals and organisations that wanted to make a difference.

With a little help with an innovative design company, a common vision started to form.
Read how Unboxed partnered with The Grantham Practice

Looking to the Future

Fast forward to May 2017 and we now have multiple agencies covering education, charities, health and social care with experience of working together and committed to developing this.

The Grantham is proud to be a lead partner this…

We are all clear now that although what drove this was the inequalities in the Portuguese Community, actually our approach, what we have learned, and the type of projects we are doing could help so many different people suffering from inequalities.

If you are based in Lambeth and would like to get involved please get in touch.

Watch this space!

The Grantham Practice Team

The Lambeth Food Coop

We are very excited and privileged to be involved in this fantastic local project, bringing green fingers to the surgery grounds.

We now have 8 planters stationed next to the surgery which we are growing vegetables in. All patients are welcome to get involved.

There will be a weekly gardening session every Wednesday from 10.00am for 2 hours. No experience needed as there will be support on hand. Get to know your neighbours, and keep your vegetables once they are ready to eat!

If you're interested in joining, please either ask at the front desk, contact Jonathan our Practice Manager or just pop along on Wednesday to find out more.

You can read about the impact of the scheme in a guardian article which Dr Sharma contributed to at this link: Guardian Article on the Lambeth Food Co-op

If you want to read more about how being green fingered might improve your health, please see this excellent summary by the Kings Fund: Kings fund summary

Education Evenings with the Methodist Church Womans’ Group

The Grantham doctors were privileged to be invited to the woman's group at the Stockwell Methodist Church for an evening in Autumn 2015. For this meeting we were asked to discuss cancers that affect females. In particulr focussing on what did they mean for a person, how to watch out for them, and how to reduce the risk of getting them. The evening was hugely enjoyed and received by everyone, and we were invited back to do further talks. As a result , this led to us providing sessions on high blood pressure and diabetes as well.
Since that time, this has now become a regular event in the Grantham calender and we hope to join up with the Clapham and Vauxhall branches of the church as well to reach an even larger congregation. We have asked the women to drag their men along as well!

KNUST-Grantham Health Partnership: Our twinning project with a family medicine clinic in Ghana

We are excited to announce that after months of planning we will be involved in an exciting and truly innovative project!

We are twinning with a family medicine clinic that is being developed by Dr Kwame Ayisi-Boateng at KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology). The University runs a medical teaching hospital in Kumasi - the second largest city in Ghana.

Family medicine is in its infancy in Ghana with only 32 fully qualified GPs for a population of 26 million people (compared to 35,000 GPs for 60 million in the UK!) Not only do we hope to help support Dr Boateng and KNUST in their vision but along the way learn more about our own patients from Ghana and the wider West African region and how we can tailor our health advice to best help them.

One of our first themes will be the development of tailored diabetes education programs that take into account differences in lifestyle, diet and beliefs. As part of this we have building links with Kings College London and are proud to be on the steering group for their research into this:Click here

However the twinning project can be so much more and we want the whole practice to be involved including our patients. If you have skills that you think can help (e.g. infrastructure support, IT development, education) and would like to get involved then please get in touch with Dr Vikesh Sharma