Aso Footohi is Peer Education Project Worker at Scottish Refugee Council
Refugees and asylum seekers are real treasures of knowledge and experience. As well as their language skills and the other qualifications and experiences they bring to Scotland, each individual brings a unique insight into the process of integration in a new country. Refugees are uniquely well placed to bring first-hand insight into the services available in Scotland and personal experience of a wide range of issues including housing, health, employment and education.
After running a series of community conferences in late 2013/ early 2014, we realised that the peer educator model could be a useful tool to help facilitate the sharing of knowledge between refugee service users and service providers. We set out to use the peer educator model as a tool to empower and support refugees to learn more about their rights and responsibilities from each other.
The project encourages people to share their experience of using different services, identify the most common issues in their communities and then try to address these issues by linking up with service providers.
Volunteers are key
The first thing we did was recruit volunteers from refugee and asylum seeking communities. After completing a series of training sessions, volunteers approached members of their communities with a view to running peer education sessions around the theme of health.
Volunteers aimed to transfer their learning and knowledge of health services and facilitate their group to share their experiences of accessing health services in Scotland. Sharing information in this way helps people learn from each other and find new ways to access the most useful and relevant services.
The first sessions have recently started and are delivered in English or in community languages. Feedback from our volunteer peer educators is very encouraging. People have told us:
“Doing this has given me the confidence to work in a Scottish office.”
“The project has given me experience to work for the first time in a team, with colleagues. It’s really enjoyable, it’s like a family.”
“I did not have any information before and now I feel I have enough to share info about the NHS services and I am familiar with other organisations who can help.”
Many people will benefit
Each volunteer will deliver at least three peer education sessions with members of their communities. We expect there to be around 25-30 beneficiaries of each group.
The Peer Education Health and Wellbeing Project is a pilot delivered by Scottish Refugee Council, funded by the NHS Health Improvement Team (North-East Sector) and evaluated by Queen Margaret University.
We hope that through this project we will:
• Identify the main challenges impacting on health and access to health services for refugees living in Glasgow
• Identify the most effective routes for signposting access to health services for refugees in Glasgow; and
• Identify what role can peer educators play in increasing access to healthy lifestyles and access to health services
We are planning to recruit a second group of volunteers shortly.
