Aims and why they matter

Our objectives and why our work is essential.

Objectives

Provide an inclusive community hub for social events, cultural functions and leisure activities – including English and mother-tongue classes – for anyone with an ethnic background living on the Wirral.

Give our service users a voice by providing people who can speak their language to advise and support them with their health, social care, education and welfare benefits’ needs.

Why it matters

People who’ve come to live here from another country face two huge barriers every single day of their lives:

Not being able to speak/read English well enough
Not knowing how things work here

We remove these language and cultural barriers, as well as related anxieties, that make life so difficult for anyone who’s come to live here from another country. We explain how things work and navigate the systems and processes on their behalf, until they’re ready to do it for themselves.

In short, we open doors to essential services that are available to everyone.

Some real examples of why it matters

We know of someone who was due to have an operation and did not understand the instruction ‘nil by mouth’ in the hours preceding it and so the surgery had to be cancelled. Not only did that mean the person had to wait longer for important medical care but the resources of the hospital were also, sadly, not optimised. That could have been prevented so easily.

In another case, a Sri-Lankan lady was found unconscious in the road. She was taken to hospital by ambulance and treated. It turned out she was diabetic but couldn’t read the instructions on her medication.

We know of another instance where a woman in hospital could not be taken off a drip and sent home, releasing a hospital bed space, because she was dehydrated. The health workers didn’t know that culturally women of her ethnicity rarely drink tap water. Something else could have been substituted to hydrate her. Yet again this situation could have been prevented so easily.

Who are our service users?

It’s anyone who has an ethnic background living here on the Wirral, and whose first language is not English. So that’s immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

Many of our service users are from China and Hong Kong (we see a large number of older women from these communities and who have little to no computer skills). The rest make up a wide range of nationalities and include families and individuals.

They mostly hear about us via word-of-mouth, through their community, or friends and family. Some are referred to us as part of funded projects, such as from GP surgeries, hospitals, via the council (the latter’s resettlement team, or social services, for example) and other like-minded charities.

How we talk to our service users

All our staff speak languages other than English and interpret and translate across our teams, as needed. With the help of external support, we can interpret or translate across 52 languages. The most recent top six languages (between Apr ’23 and Jan ’24) that we’ve interpreted or translated in are as follows: