Gilead – HIV Together Voices – George House Trust

A key priority for George House Trust is that when somebody comes through the door that they get answers to the questions that they have. Sometimes they're carrying years and years of lack of awareness and education around HIV that we need to unpick with them. What we're able to do at George House Trust is make sure that our peer mentors and our positive speakers use their lived experience to help others through theirs. Peer Mentoring in a nutshell is lived experience. So it's about training up and empowering people living with HIV to use their own experience to support others. And we're committed at George House Trust to people living with HIV playing a central role in the support process. George House Trust, Gary speaking. How can I help? Yes, can get you some advice, but can I take your name? So from the minute that you pick up the phone or you walk through the door, you'll be treated as that unique individual and people will listen, people will hear what you're saying and you will be supported. For me peer mentoring, people are becoming more aware of it as the word gets around that people have really benefited from having a peer mentor. Everyone living with HIV is very different, have different experiences, so seeing people who are for instance newly diagnosed, I can just sort of give them a little bit more of confidence or belief that they might be feeling this way now but actually you know through people around you building up a support network it doesn't have to be that way but I do feel very proud that I'm able to be there in those sort of early days especially. So I'd always say that even if you can't access something locally, know, it's always worth kind of speaking to an organisation who can signpost you to something that you can access and you don't have to face this alone. And the key thing is just give things a go. You're not signing up to anything, don't have to commit to anything, but it can really help. Sometimes some people need additional support to live well with HIV and so whether that's helping them manage their medication or engage with appointments with the NHS. So we have a team of our intensive support workers who work incredibly closely with the NHS to help people engage with their treatment and care as best as they possibly can to improve their health and outcomes. For people to be referred to support for intensive support it's usually via the clinic so over the years we've built up really good relationships with the nurses, consultants, we cover the whole 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester so our knowledge, we're constantly evolving and researching and finding different services that are out there that might help people. We're hoping that as we're working together, as time goes along, that your well-being improves. What I love is every day is different. I can use different skills with different people, meet different characters, such a variety of different people. The only common dominator is people living with HIV but their lives are completely it's not one person that's the same. My vision for people that I work with is when we first meet we always say what would you like to achieve, what is getting in the way, so we put everything in their place. We don't say right in three months you should be this, six months you should be this, we go at their pace. Some people might only need a couple of appointments but then other people it might you know some people have worked for the whole two years, two three years. I would like to see more services do what we do at the George House Trust with a more agile approach being more person centred in the way that you know oh you're not going to come to this office and do x y and z'. What we do is we adapt to them and go out in the community, out to people's houses, out in parks, go and find you know people in a tent, things like that. Think it should be for a broad range of people. Some of the best pieces of work that I've really enjoyed is working with pregnant women throughout the pregnancy. We'd work together to achieve undetectable viral load, go along, take them to all the appointments, work right up until birth, we'd see the new baby and then help them to appointments with the new baby to midwife and those babies the outcome may have been different, but working as a multidisciplinary team with the clinical staff and ourselves we, manage all four babies being born negative. We were able to identify from data that we weren't meeting the needs of African men in the way that we thought we should be doing. So we spoke to African men about what they want and need from George House Trust and worked with them on establishing an African men's engagement programme which has gone from strength to strength over the last few years. I run a project here at George's Trust called the Calabash. The Calabash provides a space for African men to come together to share experiences of living with HIV. It is a place where they come because usually men usually are not able to have those kind of connections outside, especially men who are living with HIV. The Color Batch is based around a cultural appropriate approach in the sense that we provide African food and when it comes there is ambiance about... Is just around... Is around Africa. So even the music that we play is usually Afrobeat music, music from, you know, West Africa, South Africa, and all that. I I think what what we've seen is that since the previous started, we've doubled the number of black African men on our database through our engagement with community groups because we reach out to community groups and do a lot of awareness raising through radio and everything to raise awareness about the Colabash Project and also engagement with clinicians. When I tell somebody that you can achieve everything that you are here to achieve despite your HIV status. And they believe that and they run with it and they come back and tell me and give me their testimonies of how, you know, they've gone on to achieve something as a result of coming for one session or having one to ones with me. You know, these are the things that drives me to want to continue to do the job. I see the smile on their faces, you know, yeah. We know there are a range of different barriers facing women living with HIV and we've worked with a group of dedicated and passionate women who've helped us to understand what they are and how we can improve our service offered to them. So whether that be celebratory events looking at identity, femininity and positivity or whether that be really important services such as our formula milk service for new mums and everything in between. I think for women that are being diagnosed now is a very different situation to what it was years ago because there is somewhere to go. But what hasn't changed is getting over the stigma and getting over the fear to get people through the door to come to George House. I really struggle when it comes to stigma more because it's affected me so much in the past four or five years. My status was discovered in my workplace and it was one of the most, sorry, traumatic times ever to have to come back to George House as a broken person because I was so ostracized in my workplace. So this cheery woman who's gone through life succeeded in life very well professionally came back to George House because I was so broken. Because what they'd done to me was literally took me back thirty years to when I was first diagnosed. When you have HIV it becomes the green light on your head that you think everybody can see but actually that's not true. But for every day that you live with the diagnosis you're internalising the negative image of HIV. And so our job here is a warm welcome, reassurance that you will live a long and healthy life, and then the nuts and bolts of ensuring that every woman has the tools that she needs to live confidently. And luckily, George House has got the best blaster ever of love and hugs to fix you. But without that counselling, without them ladies groups that gave me a hug and we talked about things, I wouldn't be here today because that's what stigma does. But I want to assure everybody that everyone has a different way. As soon as you come to George House someone has a conversation and they know which way to take you and they're going to make sure your journey through here will be okay, that you're going to be with the right people. It is the hardest thing you're going to do but until you make that first step you will never be where I am now. As long as HIV is out there we will never close. Our journey isn't to hold people here but to help you to get well so that you live the life you choose for, that we all have the quality of life, quality of confidence to be able to go back out into the world and engage on our terms without fear. So we're fortunate in the North West to have George House Trust, but I want you to know that there are HIV charities throughout The UK that can support you on this journey. I think tackling HIV stigma, increasing HIV awareness and connecting people to support is a real team effort. So whether that's the NHS, charities, activists, people who are active programmes. We all need to work together to raise awareness and to work towards a goal of ending new diagnosis by 2030. We're part of Fast City in Greater Manchester and Fast Track City Liverpool, George House Trust and we're really passionate and supportive and engaged with that programme of work because it's working towards ending new diagnosis of HIV which is important to us all. So we look at collaboration, we work very closely with local authorities, it's a very active voluntary community sector, really passionate clinicians working in Greater Manchester that want to provide the best care and support possible for people. And of course at the heart of it is the community themselves and making sure that people living with HIV and marginalised groups like LGBT communities for example and other marginalised groups are really at the heart of that partnership work. I think in terms of progress made around HIV we've seen some tremendous progress over the last few years. So we've seen more and more people knowing their HIV status and making sure that HIV diagnosis is diagnosed promptly. I think that of course we've also had new opportunities come forward around tackling HIV. So for example PrEP, pre exposure prophylaxis, that has been a real game changer in terms of HIV prevention, giving people the opportunity to have more control in their lives. I think what we are seeing is that, you know, there's some things that aren't shifting at the moment. So if you take an issue like stigma, for example, unfortunately, I think, you know, for some people, the stigma that they experience today in 2023 is the same that they would have experienced in the 1980s. And stigma, there's no success with HIV unless we end stigma as much as we actually get to zero new transmission rates. And if we do some of these things like tackling stigma, making sure that lived experience is at the heart of our solutions and, you know, making sure that we really, really accelerate progress on things like PrEP and on things like accessibility around testing, that I'm really confident that not only will we end all new transmissions of HIV within a generation, we will also confine stigma to the history books. If you're living with HIV and you're living in Manchester or Liverpool, George House Trust is here to support you. We do not discriminate. We're here to provide you the advocacy that you need. We're here to provide you all the support to live well with HIV. Do not hesitate to contact us because this is a safe place for you to get everything that you need around support.

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