Health feature: Ben Andrews – keeping Greater Manchester moving
Inequalities for disabled people and people with long-term health conditions have widened during the coronavirus pandemic. Many health organisations have adapted their approaches in an effort to minimise the negative impact and continue to support disabled people to be active during this time. Our latest feature hears from Ben Andrews, founder and manager of Empower You, on tackling the barriers of inactivity during Covid-19.
Ben manages work across Greater Manchester. His work involves making places and spaces accessible to enable disabled people to move more.
Tell us about how you support the health and physical activity of disabled people around Greater Manchester?
We do this in a number of ways; by working directly with local disabled people and those around them. As well as working with organisations to support inclusive practice at a more strategic level.
Our Empower You programme, delivered in Salford, Trafford and soon to be Oldham, works with local activity providers to adjust their offers to enable access by disabled people. We also work with them to support the demand by disabled people who want to access these opportunities. We repeat this in a community over a period of time until it is better equipped to support disabled people. Our vision is to see disabled people accessing and being signposted to mainstream provision becoming the norm and rendering specialist service like ours unnecessary.
We also work with health, leisure and infrastructure organisations to support towards an inclusive offer for disabled people. For example, we’ve produced marketing resources to support health teams to better engage disabled people. Through working in a collaborative way, we hope to create change and influence all layers of the system.
What have been the challenges in continuing the support you provide during Covid-19?
Like many organisations, through Covid-19 we have transitioned to online and virtual ways of working.
We work with groups of disabled people to identify activities of interest and find coaches who are able to deliver the activities. We then support the coaches to get online, if they are not already, while supporting disabled people to access the online sessions.
We support the coaches for a period of time. I’m happy to say we are now at a stage where coaches are taking independent ownership of their sessions.
The biggest challenge has been getting the message about Empower You to local people. We are no longer able to rock up at day centres, community groups or events to get people excited and engaged with our offer. This is exacerbated by many of those we work with not naturally using the internet or social media to find information on what to do. There’s a massive skills gap around this, particularly for Autistic people and people with learning and sensory impairments.
On the flip side, working digitally has allowed us to engage with people we previously would have found challenging to connect with. This includes people who prefer to stay inside and those who may face barriers with streets, transport and venue access. It’s all swings and roundabouts at the minute.
What plans do you have in place locally to continue to improve disabled people’s health and wellbeing, and experiences in sport and physical activity?
At a local level, we’ll continue to deliver Empower You in areas we are commissioned. We will look to expand the approach into new areas too.
The plan going forward will be to have a combined approach; continuing to link people in with online, and physical provision where possible. We have really good relationships with local leisure trusts and activity coaches and help them in engaging new customers at a time when engagement might be low.
We’re supporting people to access their online provision now, which will allow relationships to be maintained and developed to support attendees to transition to more physical sessions when the time is right. We’ve already seen some of our online participants making this transition (when we were allowed to). It was great to see!
(image caption: Empower You participants Abbey and Dee)
I’m also involved in Salford’s Sport England Local Pilot work. This sees me working with Salford at a system level to support organisations toward and inclusive offer for disabled people. I’ve completed various pieces of work around this over the last two years but currently we’re working on grading the accessibility of local walking routes to support more disabled people to access local parks and greenspaces.
How important is it for leisure and sport to provide inclusive and welcoming customer service and what impact does this have on disabled people’s health and wellbeing?
It’s important for sport, leisure and health providers to offer inclusive and welcoming customer service for disabled people for a number of reasons:
Firstly, it makes perfect business sense. Disabled people are a largely untapped market in leisure, being twice as likely to be inactive. Disabled people want to spend their money, particularly in leisure, with Four in five (81%) of disabled people wanting to be more active. Due to a lack of accessible provision disabled people spend their money elsewhere. Inclusive and welcoming customer service for disabled people sets your business aside and allows you to tap into that Purple pound (£249 billion).
Secondly, it supports a more aware and confident workforce. Inclusive and welcoming customer service for disabled people supports skills, insight and knowledge that will extend well beyond the benefit of just disabled people. It empowers staff to understand how to be flexible in their approach, support a wider range of people in the community and provides an appreciation of difference and diversity. What employer wouldn’t want that?
Finally, the vast majority of leisure providers have an interest and passion in supporting the health and wellbeing of the community they serve. By not having inclusive and welcoming customer service, you potentially exclude disabled people from accessing your provision, and as a result good health and wellbeing. It shouldn’t be a case of we work for one group and not another. As a provider you have a duty to ensure your interests and offer to support health and wellbeing is available to everyone.
What lasting impact do you think Covid-19 will have on the sectors and what more needs to be done at a local level to support the physical and mental health of disabled people?
I think it’s a difficult time for traditional leisure and sport providers who have invested so much into buildings now largely underused.
On the other hand, this period has offered the opportunity for leisure and sport to reflect on how effective their offers are in engaging their communities. There’s only so many people who can fit into a building, even less given the social distancing restrictions. And we know things like transport, venue access and time have been longstanding barriers to participation for both disabled and non-disabled people. Working digitally reduces these barriers, provides the opportunity to engage a larger audience and those who we previously found it challenging to engage with. It’s whether the sector has the capacity to embrace this due to current pressures. Although the risk for some providers is that if they don’t embrace it, instead of losing some of their provision, they’ll lose all of it.
Digital isn’t going away and will be vital going forward considering the potential length of lockdown and social distancing measures. From our learning, digital has the potential to bring people together based on interest rather than postcode. Digital also allows us to support relationships across communities which previously would have been logistically impossible.
However, not all people have the skill set or experience to operate online and this is a particular issue for many disabled people. Many are dependent on others for support to access digital services. So, if those around them lack the knowledge or motivation to get online, it’s unlikely the person they support will.
This skill-gap is much more about a lack of prior learning and experience than capacity. The skills and knowledge to access digital provision can be learnt. This skill-gap needs to be acknowledged and more support available for disabled people to address it. If the digital skill gap is not addressed, the repercussions for health will be significant. Not just directly Covid-19 related illness but a deterioration in general health brought on by a lack of physical and mental stimulation and social interaction. All of which we know physical activity plays a large role supporting.
It’s a case of working in partnership with organisations to address the needs of demographics who may currently be excluded. We need to adapt to the current landscape, which as a sector we know and have proved we are more than capable of.
More on Empower You
Empower You works with communities to support disabled people to lead more active lifestyles. Find out more about Empower You.
Support for Providers
We fully recognise that sport and leisure providers are going through challenging times. The impact of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic on disabled people and sport and activity has been enormous. Our Covid-19 webpage provides a range of resources and responses we have released since March 2020 to support you to embed inclusive practices and continue to support the health and physical wellbeing of disabled people.
