The maternity healthcare inequalities of women seeking asylum and refugees are well documented. But Afrocats, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, the Caribbean and African Health Network (CAHN), the Ardwick and Longsight Primary Care Network and the Little Lions Network are on a mission to change this.
Session 2
17 women from the Little Lions network joined the second Maternity Care session who were all eager to join the cultural dance workshop with Magdalen and were delighted to be moving around the world with dances from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Out of the group, 15 were new mothers.
This week we were joined by Flo, one of CAHN's Community Connectors, and Edel, Afrocats' Project Assistant. We also had a Little Lions group member there to interpret and support the group and started. We started with a recap from the previous session:
You can get Healthy Start Food Vouchers and vitamins if you are at least ten weeks pregnant, or have a child under four, and you are getting:
Income Support
income-based Jobseeker's Allowance
Child Tax Credit if your family's income is £16,190 or less, but not Working Tax Credit.
Universal Credit if your family's take-home pay is £408 or less per month.
Pension Credit.
Healthy Start vouchers are for women to access vitamin D, milk and fruit and vegetables.
If women receive a blood test that shows there are deficient in Vitamin D during winter, they can receive a voucher to help.
Flo told women that through Surestart, they could get vouchers to help with different things they needed.
Mapping local services
This week we focused on food and clothing, such as food Banks and similar offers in our neighbourhood. We went through each service with women with interpretation so that each woman could understand what was available.
Some of the women had used some food banks but did not like that they could not select items and did not find it helpful as there wasn't always food that was culturally appropriate to them.
We found that most women had not heard of any of the services that were available to them in the local area and they wanted more information.
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