HEALTH PREACHERS

 The Waltham Forest Faith Communities Forum exists to engage the boroughs diverse faith organisations in working together for the good of the whole community. Early in 2006, through our participation in the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP), we held discussions with the local Primary Care Trust (PCT) on how the Forum could help to convey key health messages to people within Waltham Forest’s religious congregations.

The idea of a “Health Preachers” scheme developed from these discussions. The key concept behind this idea was that religious people might be motivated by thier faith to make positive health changes, especially if they were able to access health messages as part of their faith community experience.

The PCT had previously run a course to train local people as Community Health Outreach Workers (CHOWs) and agreed to re-run this scheme for a group of faith community leaders recruited by the Forum. The local authority agreed to provide LSP funding for the scheme. The volunteer trainees were recruited as “Health Preachers” and it was made clear that they would be asked to communicate key health messages to thier congregations in a way that would seek to engage others with health as a faith issue.

We had an enthusisatic response from the faith communities and recruited 3 Muslim, 3 Sikh and 9 Christian leaders, the last from a wide variety of church traditions. There was no need to find common ground on faith issues so we created a comfortable environment to include some who had no previous experience of inter faith work. Needless-to-say we learnt much - not only about health but also about each other - during the duration of the 10 week training course.

“Health Preachers” was, we are sure, the first scheme of its kind in the UK and we were enthusiatic to promote it as something for others to emulate, a model for faith community engagement on the issue of health as well as a for inter faith co-operation. However, the proof of the low-fat, high-fibre fruit pudding had to be in the eating. The course made a difference to our health decisions as trainees; could we convince others, through our preaching and activities, to make positive health changes? This results of the evaluation work indicate that we could and did and demonstrate the success of the scheme.

Having coined the term “Health Preachers” and made all the practical arrangements for the training scheme, I am especially grateful to Marion Waruguru (our Faith Communities Project Manager) who helped resource the health preaching and Jonathan Mead (one of the health preachers) for collating the evaluation results and writing this report. It is without hesitation that I commend “Health Preachers” to other PCTs and faith community forums.

Copies of the report are available from Marion Waruguru and will be made available to Primary Care Trusts and Faith Forums in London.  Her contacts are on the Contact Us page.

Fr Steven Saxby