RISE Social Enterprise Case Study Films

[Boo Armstrong]
“Get Well UK” is an aspiration; in reality we are more like “Get Well very small patch of North London”. Get Well UK is a business that’s making complimentary medicine free to NHS patients. At the moment ninety percent of access to complimentary medicine, so things like acupuncture and osteopathy is private, so it’s really expensive and it means that people often can’t afford the kind of medicine that’s going to help them get better. So our mission is to make this available to everybody in the UK.

The complimentary therapies that we offer are those which have evidence to show that they work and those which are well regulated, so professionally organised. Our referrals all come through GPs so we’re really about integrating these therapies into the NHS. We had one doctor who when we first met him who said well I don’t believe in this, I think it’s a load of hokum, and for years my patients have been coming to me saying can I get some acupuncture, you know, I’ve read about it in a magazine, does it work, and I’ve kept my head in the sand, and you’re giving me an opportunity now to take my head out of the sand, refer some patients and find out if it works. So I like attitudes like that, and of course there are people who say, you know, it’s nonsense. There was some research done recently which shows that forty nine percent of GPs in England recommend complimentary medicine to their patients, so absolutely GPs are keen. And they know better than anyone else that they have patients who come back again and again with conditions that they’re not able to help. So back pain for example, if you see your doctor, they might give you some pain killers, they might refer you to a physio, but typically they’ll send you off to a waiting list to see a consultant who can’t help you. So GPs know better than anyone where there are gaps where they could do with some help from, you know, additional practitioners.

Phone rings… (Good morning Get Well Uk? Yes, good morning, how are you today? Yes very well thank you. Thank you. Your appointment was at 10.15…)

02.01
We’ve also been working hard to look at how to roll out the service, so what infrastructure is needed to provide a similar project anywhere in the UK. It’s really important to see if this model works in different ways across Britain, and what our interest is is supporting individual practitioners to come together to work within the NHS and to make sure that they are well valued and well supported in doing that work. We have not enough health professionals in the NHS at the moment, and there are sixty thousand complimentary therapists in Britain, so our interest is how we can bring those together, and as I say to really value those practitioners and their skills. So of course making it work in rural communities is absolutely vital and I think for our next pilot it’ll be important that we make, that we find out what works and what doesn’t.

02.51
The pilot projects that we’ve run so far have been through regeneration projects: there’s New Deals for Communities in forty different areas in the UK. Where there’s areas of high deprivation and need, and money has been put together to look at health, housing, education, crime and so on in a holistic manner, and so when you ask a community what they want in terms of a health service is typically they say complimentary medicine. So in the communities where we’ve worked, local people have said we want these services and then we’ve been able to provide them for them. So the money’s come from regeneration. And so what we’ve done is said to GPs you can refer your patients for free to have this kind of medicine. Our business model was then to sell to primary care trusts in England. Unfortunately they’ve just been reorganised and as you know there’s a ton of debt, more than half a billion pounds worth of debt this year in the NHS, and even though we can demonstrate that the patients get better, and that they take less medication, they see their doctor less, they go to hospital less, all these things that save money, unfortunately it’s a really bad time to sell to the NHS. But as with other enterprises, if your market isn’t working you have to deviate and look elsewhere, so we’re currently looking at working with the department for Work and Pensions and supporting people who are on the incapacity benefit to come off, ‘cos that’s another big government mission so there’s a load of money behind it, and we know that the two most common reasons that people are on incapacity benefit is because of mental health problems and because of muscular skeletal problems, back pain and so on: the very conditions where complimentary medicine is brilliant.

Sounds of people talking in a waiting surgery

04.32
The House of Lords did an enquiry into complimentary medicine and they made three main recommendations: that we need more research, better regulation, and that those therapies that have evidence to show they work that are well organised professionally should be available through the NHS with GPs acting as the gatekeepers. So that gave us the legitimacy to set up ‘cos the House of Lords said it, but also it gave us a way of managing demands.

More surgery sounds.

05.00
I think terms of the health professionals, the complimentary practitioners, they’re on board. We’ve done a lot of work with the professional organisations and some practitioners want the opportunity to help people in their communities get better. Twenty years ago they might have trained as a doctor but now they want to embrace something that’s more holistic and understand medicine in a wider context and understand a person in the context of their whole environment and where they live and all their habits and so on. So, you know, if you live in a community in your village and you see people who would definitely benefit from being treated by you, your motivation is going to be to work with them. So we want to help people like that work within the NHS, and they haven’t got the time to deal with all the bureaucracies and hassles so we’re trying to do some of that work for them.

Sound of someone entering a room… (Hi Lesley… Hi Julia…)

I’m really excited that our mission is working. We are trying to make complimentary medicine available to all people so particularly those who otherwise aren’t able to afford it.

(So how’s your week been?... It’s been very very heavy for me this week. There’s been a lot going on… )

06.09
Many of our patients are older, they’ve had their conditions a long time, and the majority of them couldn’t afford to access this kind of care privately. We’ve got some patients who, when they were working they were able to see say an osteopath, and now they’ve retired they can’t afford to, and so their health is deteriorating. So now through us they are able to go to their GP clinic and support their health.

06.34
There are loads of organisations in Britain doing really similar work to us: people who are working hard and passionately and enthusiastically and really professionally to get complimentary medicine available across communities. So I know of healers working in GP surgeries in Devon, there’s a fantastic holistic drug rehab program working across Cornwall, there are people working in care homes and hospices, there’s people working in mental health day centres, there’s just more and more provision of complimentary medicine in our communities. And I think at the moment we’re quite hidden politically and certainly the big purchasers of services, you know our Primary Care Trust and Social Services, the people with our tax payers money at the moment don’t buy enough of our services, so I think as organisations and social enterprises it’s really important that we become more visible and that we communicate just how professional we are, and also how much our patients’ health improves, and what value we add to our societies.

07.39
If you had a pain in your shoulder and you couldn’t carry your shopping home, then you can’t eat and you can’t cook and all this stuff, and if someone helps you get that better then of course you’re really grateful, so it’s having that kind of enthusiastic support from our patients keeps us going personally. ‘Cos actually it’s quite a hard slog: we’re trying to change the NHS, you know, the big picture is that we’re hoping for a revolution so of course you need a lot of support to do that.