Anger mounts in black community over threat to Brent Sickle Cell project

For readers unfamiliar with the impact of sickle cell this video provides some background

There have been a number of angry reactions to Nan Tewari's guest blog LINK about the threatened cut to the funding of the Brent Sickle Cell project which highlighted the threat itself and the failure to adequately consult with the populations most affected in Stonebridge and Harlesden wards.

The decision of the Brent Clinical Commissing Group to hold a consultation meeting at an inconvenient time in Wembley Park drew this response:

The decision to hold the meeting away from Harlesden and Stonebridge is a deliberate and cynical act of tokenism by Brent CCG and renders the meeting as merely a 'paper exercise'. Why is Brent CCG treating this vulnerable group of patients in such a dismissive way?

It would appear that Brent CCG is increasingly showing itself to be incapable of performing it's functions with any degree of competence.

Time it was held up to public scrutiny.

One comment asked bluntly if it was 'because we are black?'

Nan herself put it in the context of the treatment of residents in Harlesden and Stonebridge and the perceived lack of action by local councillors.

As if it weren't bad enough that the Central Mid A & E was closed down.....

As if it weren't bad enough that sickle cell treatment was moved to Northwick Park, 2 buses away......

As if it weren't bad enough the Harlesden population lives a decade less than others in Brent......

I suppose after closing down the Stonebridge adventure playground, Brent's councillors are too embarrassed to take Brent CCG to task over this - if indeed the sleepy councillors can even be bothered about it - after all, Harlesden and Stonebridge are pretty much captive voters for them.

Leroy Decosta Simpson, Harlesden activist said that he would would like to see the paperwork and get his 'big bwoys' to look into it.

Philip Grant in his usual meticulous way looked at the documentation and wrote:

The report that went to the CCG's Governing Body on 6 July includes the following important paragraph:

'Overall the service is seen by service users as a valued and forward thinking service model that supports the management of this long term condition, in an area of particularly high prevalence. However, the agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) demonstrate a level of performance that requires improving. The service provider has cited a number of operational issues which has adversely impacted on performance and delivery of the KPIs.'

The first sentence confirms that the project, which had only been running for a year, was already providing a very valuable and worthwhile service to the people who needed it most.

The second sentence refers to the failure to meet some of the "Key Performance Indicators", showing that the service needed to be improved, while the third sentence shows that there were reasons to show why these KPI's had not been met in the first year.

Given the positive impact of providing the service in its "start-up" year, it is difficult to understand why it was not given at least another year to make the improvements that were needed. Instead, the CCG's Executive recommended, and the Governing Body accepted, the following option:

'Not to extend the pilot but explore alternative sustainable models for care for example a peer support model with Brent Council or the use of the PAM tool can be explored to support this cohort of patients.'

It appears that the CCG wants to pass some of its own responsibility for (and cost of) the care of sickle cell sufferers onto Brent Council, whose services are already stretched, without consulting with or considering the needs of 'this cohort of patients'.

Nan Tewari, referring to the last paragraph, responded:

A fellow patient rep who attended the CCG meeting said afterwards, that the Brent Council public Health rep on the Governing Body said flatly that the council had no money to support a project.

This issue, which disproportionately affects Brent's Black Caribbean and Black African population, is one that could cause massive disaffection.  The CCG's decision needs to be reviewed, proper consultation put in place and an independent Equalities Impact Assessment carried out.

Incidence of sickle cell trait is approximately 1 in 4 West Africans and 1 in 10  Black Caribbean.

The Brent Patient Voice submission to the CCG can be found HERE

The Brent CCG Governing Body papers can be found HERE

The Grunwick strike began 40 years ago today: 'WE ARE THOSE LIONS' - commemoration events

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From Grunwick40

It's an important day. Today is the 40th anniversary of the first moments of the Grunwick strike – and we're proud to announce our plans to commemorate it.  We'll be running a series of inspiring, thought-provoking events exploring Grunwick and its legacy, launching with Grunwick Memories on Saturday 27 August. Grunwick Memories is a free event, giving you the opportunity to explore and contribute to the Grunwick archive held by Brent Museum and Archives. Come along and take part in a story sharing session and add your memories and experiences of the strike to the Archive. You will also get an exclusive look at some of the materials that will feature in the upcoming exhibition. Grunwick Memories will take place at Brent Archive, on the second floor of The Library at Willesden Green, Willesden High Road NW10 2SF, from 2-4 pm on Saturday 27 August. Please join us! Email museum.archives@brent.gov.uk or call 020 8937 3600 for more information. Other upcoming events:   • We are those lions: The story of the Grunwick strike 1976-78 exhibition, launching October 2016 at The Library at Willesden Green. Look out for the launch date – coming soon. • The Great Grunwick Mural unveiling, Chapter Road, NW10. Be the first to see our amazing murals in place near the original Grunwick site. The design and unveiling details are still under wraps, but we'll be revealing details over the next few weeks, along with the names of our special guests, who'll be providing music and entertainment. • Explore Grunwick in more detail at our November events, a film screening and discussion on “Race and the Unions” at SOAS, November 2nd, and Grunwick 40: The Conference, The Library at Willesden Green, November 26th – booking for these events will open in October. Yours in solidarity, Grunwick 40 PS: Don't miss out on the reissued anniversary edition of Grunwick: The Workers’ Story, by Jack Dromey and Graham Taylor, with an updated introduction – due out in late September.

Sufra NW London offer intensive 10 week catering training programme

From Mohammed S Mamdani, Director, Sufra NW London

Chef Ignacio is on a mission to recruit, train and find employment for 20 adults in the catering industry.

This autumn, Sufra NW London launches Food Academy Plus, which will transform the lives of people who are on a low-income or long-term unemployed. It’s an intensive 10-week programme, requiring a commitment of 24 hours each week, which will include all the training, coaching and support needed to find sustainable employment.

It’s our most exciting project ever (I know I’ve said that about everything we do, but seriously, it gets even more exciting every time!).

Across the programme, participants will learn professional cooking skills, project management skills and customer service. There will also be compulsory study sessions in numeracy, literacy and ICT, work experience in a professional restaurant at the London Designer Outlet – as well as the support of a mentor and employment coach throughout. There will be plenty of real-life experience, including setting up a food stall outside Brent Civic Centre.

The programme will end with a pop-up restaurant at Sufra NW London, where we will invite local employers to see the skills of our graduates first-hand and head-hunt for new chefs, waiters and restaurant staff.

As an incentive, participants will receive a free chef’s uniform, 3-month bus pass and access to all in-house support and opportunities available at Sufra NW London. That includes a discretionary fund, which is used to financially support vulnerable and/or low-income volunteers. It really gets better and better!

We’re making a huge investment in this programme, and Chef Ignacio has a little bit of the Gordon Ramsey about him. He takes no bullsh*t and is looking for committed people who really want to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.

Interested candidates will need to complete an application form, which is available here. The deadline for applications is Thursday 22 September 2016 with interviews the following week.

VOLUNTEER: To support the programme, Chef Ignacio is looking for additional volunteers to assist with basic skills training in literacy, numeracy and ICT as well mentoring new recruits. You can find information on both roles here.

PROMOTE: If you work for a charity or community organisation, and would like us to come and present the opportunity to your service users or members, Paul and Karlem will be happy to come over for a chat.

What’s happening to the regular Food Academy programme?

It’s still happening. Chef Ignacio will continue to invest in the cookery skills of young people. If you’re aged under 19 years (and older than 12) expect to be astounded by Ignacio’s knife skills and his focaccia bread.

The course runs on Saturday mornings from 10am to 2pm for 5 weeks. At the end you’ll receive a recognised AQA certificate. You can register here.

Come and be pampered for a good cause at Brent Civic Centre

 From1Voice Community Forum

 1Voice Community Forum is a voluntary charity run by parent carers for parent carers of disabled children who live in Brent.

Our main purpose is to relieve the needs of families and carers by offering practical advice, support and signposting them to services and facilities that are available to meet their needs. We also encourage parents to participate in training and consultation events to empower themselves to reach a positive and best outcome for their families.

We do this by running regular parent groups, events, trips, attendance at relevant conferences  and by running free training on legislation and  new guidance at the local and national level. We also provide targeted training for parents on managing their children’s disability and behavior in partnership with our colleagues from health, education and voluntary agencies.

On Sunday August 28th we are holding a Community Fun 'n Pamper Day at Brent Civic Centre from  11am to 4pm. Starbucks are donating us space in their coffee shop and we are inviting you to join us for a day of relaxation, children's fun and enjoyment whilst you relax and enjoy the pampering on offer.

Prices are £2 adults and £1 children in advance or £3 adults and £2 children on the door.

Proceeds will go towards running our organisation.

 

'It's cool to love where you live' project workshop this afternoon in Neasden

Corbyn in Kilburn on Sunday

From Brent Momentum

We will be joined by Jeremy Corbyn, trade unionists and community activists from across the country at this event on Sunday in Kilburn. This will be a coming together to show support for Jeremy’s vision to rebuild and transform Britain.
This is a ticketed event so please RSVP HERE

WHEN

August 21, 2016 at 6pm - 8pm

WHERE

Ruach City Church
197 199 Kilburn High Rd
London NW6 7HY
United Kingdom
Google map and directions

Editor's note: There will be no Overground service on the Euston-Watford line on Sunday and no Bakerloo service  north of Queen's Park.

Putting ‘Pokémon Go’ into perspective

Article by Jackie Marsh, from School of Education, University of Sheffield, web page LINK

Already, tales of mythic proportions surround the ‘Pokémon Go’ app. Reports abound of stabbings, robbings, shootings, people falling off cliffsand even finding corpses as they play the game. There are concerns aboutsex offenders targeting children, and children accessing dangerous spaces to get their next Pokémon monster. A New Zealand resident recently quit his job to play the game full-time, and people joined crowds to get to a rare monster in Central Park, fostering anxieties about addiction. Now even the police are using the app to catch fugitives.

The moral panic surrounding the launch of new media titles is not new, as I have discussed previously when comparing the audience response of Disney’s film ‘Frozen’ to that of the Disney ‘Davy Crockett’ film launched in the 1950s, but what is of interest is the speed of this response, given that ‘Pokémon Go’ was only launched a few weeks ago, on July 6th. The rapid take-up of the app has occurred with little direct marketing.

For the uninitiated, the free-to-play app draws on augmented reality technology to enable players to capture and train virtual Pokémon creatures, whose images pop up, overlaid on the ‘real’ world, on a mobile device. Augmented Reality (AR) consists of a blend of the physical world and the virtual world. In this blended reality, three-dimensional images or environments are projected onto a physical object or terrain, but users are not immersed in the same way as they are with virtual reality experiences.

This is not the first app to use augmented reality to entice its users. We undertook a research study on under 5’s use of tablet apps in the UK, in which children’s engagement with augmented reality apps was examined. The research team watched as children, enthralled, made the popular charity figure Pudsey bear appear in 3D and dance to disco music using the Quiver app, or played with augmented reality animals that appeared in the ‘AR Flascards’ app. As we stated in a subsequent paper from the study which reflected on play in the digital age, “Contemporary play draws on both the digital and non-digital properties of things and in doing so moves fluidly across boundaries of space and time in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital era” (Marsh et al., 2016). Augmented reality technology is still at an early stage of development, but the hype surrounding it indicates that it has the potential to excite and is a feature that is bound to become more prevalent in the toy and game industry in the future.

The ‘Pokémon Go’ app is notable for its popularity across generations. It appeals to those who collected the plastic Pokémon monsters in the brand’s earlier incarnations, taking them back to a fondly remembered childhood pastime. It could even remind them of previous GPS location-based tagging games they may have played, such as ‘Foursquare’ (whose creator, Dennis Crowley, has said he is not at all bitter about the success of ‘Pokémon Go’).

Such nostalgic media practices are nothing new, as numerous scholars have noted, but what makes this one particularly exciting for its adult fans is the transformation of their childhood monsters into virtual characters that live in their smartphone. The app is also drawing in a new Pokémon audience, one that knows little about the original television animation, video games or toys, launched initially in 1995. It offers opportunities, therefore, for family play, as noted by commentators who are keen to identify the game’s positive elements in the face of all of the media panic. And, as some have asked, shouldn’t we be pleased that the game has got people off sofas and into their local environments?

Of course, this calculated appeal to an intergenerational audience is one that is already paying off, with the app becoming more successful on launch than Candy Crush, and Nintendo, the original creators of Pokémon, estimated to be worth an additional $12 billion because of it. For both Nintendo and Niantic, the company that created the app, the real value of the game may not be in the microtransactions it embeds, with the possibility to purchase in-game features, but in the potential commercial use of the data it collects from the people who play it. This, as scholars of children’s media practices have pointed out in relation to other digital games, raises key questions about data privacy and children’s rights.

It would seem, therefore, that the launch of ‘Pokémon Go’ has resulted in the familiar tropes of panic and hype that surround many launches of new games and toys. The longevity of the app is difficult to ascertain at this point in time. When the excitement dies down, it remains to be seen what the impact of the app will be on future markets for this kind of game.

‘Pokémon Go’ has succeeded because of its combination of GPS and augmented reality technologies, linked to a very popular media brand that already involved collecting items — thus, players enjoy the familiarity of playing with the old alongside experiencing the excitement of engaging with the new. It will be difficult for other game studios to copy that specific dynamic, but no doubt there will be many attempts to do so, and we could see location-based AR games becoming further intertwined with popular culture as people search local communities for virtual representations of toys, musicians, TV and film characters, media icons and more.

In time, apps may be made available that enable user-generated content, so that the general public can leave their virtual wares in physical spaces for others to gather. Given children’s appetite for media content created by other children, that would undoubtedly be a popular type of app, albeit one potentially fraught with all kinds of safety issues. It will be incumbent upon researchers of children’s media use to trace the risks embedded in such developments, but also to identify the opportunities they present for engaging children and young people in digital content creation.

Now, forgive me, but I really have to leave it at that and get ready to go to my local ‘Pokémon Picnic’ — who knows, I might catch an Articuno…

– Jackie MarshProfessor of Education, Chair of the DigiLitEY project.

Green Party urges Government to fulfil promise to help child asylum seekers

The Green Party has urged the British Government to act on its promise to help unaccompanied child refugees as UK councillors visit Calais LINK.

Natalie Bennett, Green Party Leader, said:

Britain has a humanitarian responsibility to help the unaccompanied children in Calais - and through what was known as the Dubbs amendment, passed four months ago, we have promised to do so.

Yet the Government has not acted, and thousands of unaccompanied children fleeing war have been left in acute danger.

History will not judge us favourably if we abandon our responsibility to these children.