Feedback has been received from all 20 of our grant recipients. Six projects are fully complete. One project has been significantly delayed by ongoing reorganisation at the Trust. The others are at different stages of implementation, either busy preparing materials or the middle of planned activities.
Joan Hartley’s project in East Anglia is an example of ongoing activity. 60 deaf people have attended pilot medicines information sessions at Cambridge & Peterborough and more sessions have been arranged in other areas of East Anglia through local Deaf Associations. In this case the grant money is being used to pay for British Sign Language interpreters.
In some cases materials are in preparation, such as Men’s Health Forum which is currently collating the 50 questions most frequently asked about medicines by men, for their website; and Age Concern’s leaflet about medicines awareness for older people, which is being reviewed for accuracy by a pharmacy organisation.
One feature of the grants is how many have been used to reach people who otherwise have limited access to information and advice about medicines. The Dudley, ‘Talking to communities to improve medicine taking’ project has supported well over 100 people in sessions held at a range of community groups including an Asian Women’s Centre; a Disabled Women’s Group; an Asian Elderly Association and a Caribbean Black Carers Group.
In other cases, grant money is being used to prepare or update materials that will be useful to by large numbers of medicine users. For example, the Blood Pressure Association is updating and expanding its blood pressure medicines area of the website and medicines leaflets to: cover the changes in prescribing brought in by the NICE guidelines ACD approach to managing high blood pressure; enhance the literature within areas of particular concern to people with high blood pressure, as expressed through telephone enquiries and literature feedback forms; and explore the issues of the use and benefits of combination drugs for treating high blood pressure. In an average month the BPA website receives 90,000 visitors, of which 12,000 are visits to the medication information pages. The Worthing and District Carers Liasons Service used their grant for the development of three training sessions on ‘Understanding Medicines – A guide for carers and older people’ including an information booklet to accompany the training sessions. Please click here to download a copy of this.
The projects funded by Ask Grants are mostly being evaluated using informal approaches appropriate to small-scale activities. Feedback has generally been very good, as illustrated by the Brent Carers Centre project, where 5 sessions have been held including one for carers of people with mental health problems. Everyone who completed evaluation forms (75%) found their sessions useful or very useful, and more than 80% said that it was very useful. Verbatim comments bore this out and all said they would recommend the sessions to other carers.