When Priya first moved to Bearsden from Chennai twelve years ago, she knew the name of her GP surgery but very little else. She had questions about her daughter's recurring chest infections, about her own blood pressure, about when a symptom warranted a call and when it could wait. But asking those questions — in an unfamiliar system, in a second language, in a room where she sometimes felt out of place — took a kind of courage that shouldn't be necessary just to access healthcare.
That experience is exactly what Vibrant Health Advocates - Ascent was established to address. Our community health workshops are designed not as lectures but as conversations. We hold them in familiar spaces — community centres, places of worship, local libraries — and we deliver them in the languages our participants actually think in: Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Mandarin, and others depending on the neighbourhood group we are working with. The format is deliberately informal. Tea is made. Children are welcome. Questions are not just allowed; they are the point.
Each workshop series covers a core curriculum: how to register with a GP, how to read a prescription label, what a referral pathway looks like, how to prepare for a hospital appointment, and how to advocate for yourself or a family member when you feel you are not being heard. These are skills that many long-established residents take entirely for granted, but that can feel opaque and even intimidating to families who came to the UK as adults.
Beyond the practical information, our facilitators — themselves members of minority-ethnic communities in and around Bearsden — bring cultural fluency that a leaflet simply cannot replicate. They understand the hesitancy that can come from cultural norms around discussing illness, the mistrust that sometimes follows experiences of discrimination in healthcare settings, and the very real pressure of translating for elderly relatives who rely on family members to navigate appointments on their behalf.
In the past year alone, we have run fourteen workshop sessions reaching over 280 participants across East Dunbartonshire. Follow-up surveys consistently show that attendees leave feeling more confident about contacting their GP, more aware of NHS 24 as a resource, and more prepared to ask questions during consultations.
One attendee told us she had waited three years before asking her doctor about a lump she had found, because she was afraid of wasting his time. After attending our workshop on self-advocacy in medical settings, she made the appointment within the week. The lump was benign — but the relief of finally knowing changed everything.
We are currently developing a new module focused on mental health, recognising that stigma around psychological wellbeing is particularly pronounced in some of the communities we serve, and that NHS talking therapies can feel inaccessible when cultural context is absent from the referral conversation.
If you would like to attend an upcoming session, refer a neighbour, or invite us to deliver a workshop within your community group, please get in touch. Health confidence is something every family in Bearsden deserves — and we are here to help build it, one conversation at a time.
