NHS Forth Valley Keep Well Team

Keep Well is a community based early intervention service which aims to provide person centred, health focused assessments, along with health promoting conversations and support, to inspire health behaviour changes and prevention of disease. Keep Well targets those who are most vulnerable in society to reduce inequalities in ill health and to improve health and retention in work throughout Forth Valley.

During the pandemic, face to face assessments and interventions ceased for almost 18 months. Far from being affected by this the Keep Well team rallied, organised training, learned some new skills and became an integrated part of the COVID assessment centre, the vaccination team, and worked extra hours with the health visiting service.

Proving to be a responsive, flexible working team, we learned from the pandemic and are in the process of building up the service and incorporating this learning into some new ways of working.

We have established other ways of effectively communicating with our clients, not only face to face but telephone conversations, Near Me video calls, texting and e-mailing. A combination of these provides a well rounded effective interaction with clients from which we have had some excellent feedback.

“Loved the assessment, found it so helpful, it is a fantastic service.”

“ Really listened to my story”

“I was sent some really useful information that I still refer to, this had helped me lose weight and lower my cholesterol. Thank you!”

To ensure that all clients are getting the same great service, interventions and information, a period of reflection, re-training, sharing information and learning from each other ensued.

We have fortnightly staff meetings to discuss all maters within the team. The staff are excellent at sharing their learning and stories at these meetings.

We decided to introduce peer learning – the staff all picked another member of staff within the team to shadow during face to face health assessments. They chose staff members with different skill sets to learn from. This improved knowledge and understanding in many aspects of the assessment from clinical skills, mental wellbeing  skills, social interaction, communication skills , employability and admin skills, to working with individuals with learning disabilities, young people, asylum seekers, justice service  users and refugees.

This has worked well, the service continues to build and go from strength to strength with help from our HSCP colleagues and other partners throughout Forth Valley.