As part of October’s Black History Month celebrations at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, the community liver health checks team attended the event on 24 October 2024 at Thackray Museum of Medicine at St James Hospital in Leeds.
The focus of the event was to celebrate Black History, reclaiming narratives lost in history. Guest speakers at the event were the Lord Mayor of Leeds Abigail Marshall – Katung and Yvonne Coghill CBE a former Director for Workforce Race Equality at NHS London, and a characterization play of Mary Seacole about her part in black history and nursing.
The event was an opportunity for the community liver health checks team to raise awareness of the liver health checks project to staff at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT), particularly staff from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds.
At the event, LTHT staff were given the opportunity to have a liver fibroscan on our mobile clinic vehicle that was parked outside the Thackray Museum. The Team from the Hepatitis C Trust also supported this initiative and offered testing for hepatitis C.
Not to miss a photo opportunity the team invited the Lord Mayor to join our team photo with our clinic vehicle ‘O-Liver’!
John Fox The Hepatitis C Trust West Yorkshire Programme Manager said: “It was great to raise awareness of hepatitis C amongst staff from Leeds Teaching Hospitals, reaching a different group of people that we are not able to usually engage with at community events. It was also interesting to learn about people’s background and experiences and making contacts that could help my team to engage with new groups and communities in the future.”
Diane Williams ODN Network Manager and Project Lead for the community liver health checks Project said: ”This was a great opportunity to engage with staff and offer the service that we offer to the public to our colleagues at their place of work. This is the first time we have offered the service to Trust staff and following the success of the event we are planning more dates for staff in the next few months.”
The team would like to thank LTHT the BME Staff Network Co-chairs Modupe Hector-Goma and Padma Dinesh for allowing our team to join the celebrations for Black History Month and raising awareness of the work we do.