Mind the Health Gap Podcast is Out Now!
A deep dive into children's health, Scotland's drug policies and men's mental wellbeing.
Photo by Jackie Dives
For the past year, the team at Greater Govanhill has been working with investigative journalism co-op, The Ferret, to look at health inequalities and some of the solutions that could help alleviate them. We’ve written about issues and the solutions, locally in Govanhill and we’ve heard from the rest of the world, like India. The theme of our last issue was about community responses to health inequalities. Members of our community wrote about the peer support programme launched by Community Renewal Trust Rom Romeha (meaning ‘For Roma by Roma’) and Mary, whom we first met during our video workshops shared her experience of motherhood and the vital support she received from groups like AMMA.
In our podcast, we wanted to touch on recently published research. An independent review of health inequalities in Scotland published by the Health Foundation found that there are three main areas of concern - each of which we talk about in our Mind the Health Gap podcast.
Episode one looks at inequalities in the health and experiences of infants and children. We spoke to experts, parents and groups like Milk Cafe here in Scotland. We also looked further afield, in London, where a culturally considerate project is supporting Bangladeshi mums to improve the health and wellbeing of their young children.
Nurture Early for Optimal Nutrition was co-produced by healthcare experts and parents. In the first episode, we speak to some of the experts involved and the mums who attended the workshops.
Episode two is all about the prevalence of drug-related deaths. We visit Simon Community Scotland‘s We See You project and hear from coordinator Jim Thomson and participant Owen Docherty about the power of finding connections.
Co-editor of The Ferret, Karin Goodwin, also visits Vancouver where Trey Helton tells us how the Overdose Prevention Society is saving lives… and explains how it’s helped the city’s most prolific cat burglar go legit.
The final episode looks at health and socioeconomic outcomes among young and middle-aged men. In this episode we hear from James, a joiner from Glasgow, about his struggles with his mental health and Bill Hill of the Lighthouse charity tells us about the way the construction industry, which is currently losing two workers to suicide every day, has been forced to mobilise to save lives.
We also visit San Francisco’s Harm Reduction Therapy Center and find out how offering people struggling with substance use therapy on the street is dismantling the myth that some are hard to reach.