Kakou Talk – Episode 8 with Karen Lawson

Louis
Hey there, my name’s Louis, and you’re listening to Kakou Talk- a podcast about community and accessibility brought to you by Kakou Technologies. You’re listening to Episode 8, with Karen Lawson. I just want to really quickly apologise before we get stuck into this episode of Kakou Talk as during the recording and editing process I was faced with quite a few technical and audio hiccups. Now, what this will mean most noticeably to you, the audience, is that the overall, general quality of our recording is much, much below the standards I like to typically keep on this show. It also means that this conversation may seem to come to quite an abrupt close, and that’s because the last 10 minutes or so of Karen’s audio- I was unable to salvage. So, I can only apologise for these technical issues and make a promise that I really, really do not want to repeat this and have this happen again in the future of Kakou Talk. However, despite these technical problems, me and Karen still have a really interesting and enlightening conversation and I’m really excited to share it with you all. I hope you enjoy!

Louis
Hello and welcome back to what will be episode 8 of Kakou Talk. It’s been a little while since I’ve done this, I’ve just realised it’s been about a year actually and I’m very pleased to be back with an episode revolving around the Feeling Connected projects Loneliness Awareness Week that we’re doing in collaboration with them. And my guest today is Karen Lawson. Hello Karen.

Karen
Hi, hi. Thank you for the invite for today.

Louis
That’s alright, thank you for doing it.

Karen
No problem at all, no problem. How you doing?

Louis
Yeah, yeah, I’m doing alright. We’re recording online- our last few episodes have been recorded in person in the office, so this is the first online one I’ve done in a little while. As you know, there’s a kind of a bit of a technical stall at the beginning, but I figured it out. It’s not too difficult.

Karen
That’s okay. Yeah, I think it always feels a bit weird doing things online. And I think that’s quite relevant to the topic as well, isn’t it? Going through COVID and everything. A lot of work placements went on to online kind of working and in turn has created a lot of loneliness and isolation, even in the workplace. So yeah, different platform. But hopefully one day I get to meet you in a physical person too.

Louis
Yeah, well it’s still nice to meet you even if it’s online. But yeah, like you said, ever since 2020 and the pandemic, I feel like people who didn’t know a thing about it, my grandparents wouldn’t have known anything about video calls and suddenly they’re like, more up on Zoom than I am!

Karen
Yeah, absolutely agree with you. Same for my parents, they’re not tech savvy, but they can use, you know, FaceTime now and things like that. So it’s made people shift their thinking. Some benefits, but I do feel there’s a greater connection in a face-to-face kind of meeting, et cetera. I think that’s always good for human connection.

Louis
Yeah, I agree. I think during the isolation of the pandemic, I think a lot of people kind of embraced the whole online connectivity thing. I think we- So much loneliness was born out of the fact that ‘I haven’t seen my neighbours in weeks, I haven’t seen my family in months’, you know, it’s that kind of level of… you maybe don’t necessarily even appreciate that until it’s until it’s not available to you anymore you know?

Karen
Yeah for me on a personal level, quite an interest in the story actually, which brings me probably to where I am today.

Louis
Yeah, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Karen
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I am a social prescribing link worker and often people think ‘well what is that?’ and they automatically assume that I can prescribe medicine. So, I do work in a GP surgery, I work at Wittington Moor Surgery in Chesterfield. I absolutely love my surgery that I work in. I’m part of something called a PCN which is a primary care network. So they’re kind of the umbrella to numerous surgeries across Chesterfield and Northeast Derbyshire. So we’re basically the Chesterfield and Dronfield area. So there’s eight of us in the team and for myself I have probably the biggest uptake in social prescribing in my area. So I constantly have a huge waiting list for people to see, a very busy lady. So social prescribing is something that basically is the holistic kind of wraparound GP services. So for example, if someone went to the surgery for a GP appointment, as you know, a lot of people do know they only get about 10 minutes, so it’s a very, very kind of definite time and in fact nowadays I think you can only go and talk about one particular problem that you have. So, say for example you had a verruca on your foot, then that 10 minutes is about the verruca on your foot, but you might want to talk about the rash that you’ve got on your back, you know what I mean? But that would be a separate appointment. So it’s a very kind of specific time that they work to. So in those 10 minutes, it’s very difficult for a GP to find out what’s going on in someone’s life. So often someone might go with anxiety or stress or ask for sleeping tablets or something along those lines and the GP suddenly hasn’t got time to kind of peel back the onion layers and kind of work out what’s going on with that person. So… often they ask if they want to signpost, it’s with the patient’s consent that they would be signposted to myself. And what we do is pick up that patient and kind of get to know them. It’s very, very person-centred, so each person is completely different to the next one that comes along. And we work out kind of with them, so, and empower them really, to perhaps take a little bit of control of the life or… find out why they’re not sleeping, what is it? Is it that they’re lonely, isolated? Is it that they have family issues? Are they going through some particular stress or trauma? Are they seeking employment? Are they recently bereaved? Do they have addictions? And the list goes on. So our job is extremely varied. So one minute you can be handling someone that’s, you know… recently been bereaved and it could be a horrific kind of trauma around that bereavement. Or you could be handling someone that is very lonely and isolated and not seen someone for two years at the door. So like I say each one is individual and what we do is work with that patient for a considerable length of time, again that’s person-centred and we try and signpost them to things that will help them. Often those signposts mean that we connect with other health services. So it could be that they might need talking therapists for counselling, or they may need some help from Derbyshire Recovery Partnership for addiction, or we might simply signpost them to the voluntary sector, which is enormous. And it’s a huge, huge kind of stepping stone for people in making a difference in their lives. So we might take them to a knit and natter group for example. As daft as it sounds- you might have to stop me from talking too much Louis! (Laughs)

Louis
No, no! Honestly, I was not… before we had this conversation, I wasn’t aware of, I wasn’t aware that social prescribers even existed.

Karen
Existed! Yeah.

Louis
Is it like a relatively new thing?

Karen
Um, yes, in the scheme of things it is. There was a big push for social prescribing, obviously, during Covid and then now I believe almost every GP surgery in the country should have a social prescriber. But like I say, we connect with different organisations and the voluntary sector and we try and connect people with places that may help them on their journey. So like I say, you could go to Knit and Natter, but also, you know, there’s a great little, for example, bereavement group in Chesterfield that I’ve taken people to. Or, Louis, this is a big one- some people really struggle just to get out of their house. Some people have, you know, suffer so much with anxiety and stress and social isolation and social anxiety that’s been brought around by- not just COVID- but other incidents as well. But they struggle. So, you know, they struggle to even kind of get up in the morning or peel back the curtains, and we try our best to support around whatever the issue that has probably led them to that kind of way of life and work out better routes. But it is really about empowering the person. Myself, it’s led me to lots of different journeys, my job now. So I actually run a few projects myself and I’ve been involved with some great projects as well, collaborations with other people which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed but also it’s kind of making that difference in the community. Community is so important, I really do believe that and particularly around mental health. I could talk to you all day about mental health and the fact that you know it’s still very relevant that particularly in our area that suicide levels are quite high, demographically we’re high in the country for you know mental health and suicide, yeah.

Louis
Derbyshire?

Karen
Absolutely, Derbyshire in particular is really high we do have pockets of deprivation that obviously influence that but we should never judge a book by its cover because, well, I don’t know whether you know, but a lot of suicides are really from the people that you find are smiling the most, the ones that you never know.

Louis
Yeah, of course.

Karen
And those are the kind of people that we try to pick up and help and support before they get to that point, obviously. So yeah, that’s what kind of social prescribing in a suitcase is, it’s huge. How big do you want to go?

Louis
Well it’s like I said earlier, it’s a field that is completely new to me. It’s not something I was aware of. So this is all genuinely very interesting to me. And like you said, very relevant to the loose theme of this conversation, which is reducing loneliness and addressing the kind of, mental and social and even physical barriers that can stop people from… interacting with their loved ones and their community and lead to a sense of isolation, especially you know, kind of from the pandemic but just in general you know?

Karen
Absolutely!

Louis
Just connecting people and the effect that it has when you see people who have lost that sense of community, have lost that togetherness, have lost that ability to yeah like not be lonely, to be around people, to be social animals.

Karen
Yes, yeah.

Louis
And like you know like this you know this is going out during loneliness awareness week and we’re going to be doing a lot with Feeling Connected, which is a charity that I know some of your patients may have benefited from.

Karen
Oh yes.

Louis
The type of work that they do is loneliness reduction, I’m sure you’ve probably seen some patients who have benefited from that.

Karen
Hugely. So Feeling Connected in our area has been fantastic. I love the project, I love what Derbyshire Voluntary Action group have done with this, I love the guys that work there, they have kind of developed and grown. It’s helped with just, I can speak for myself, but obviously I know other colleagues that it’s helped and supported, but they support people to get kind of groups off the ground. They’re so much bigger than that by the way, but generally a lot of my patients have connected with some of those groups. Equally, some of my patients have developed groups that feeling connected. have supported.

Louis
Oh really?

Karen
Yes, yes. I mean they supported the Chesterfield Community Roast which is something that I’m very passionate about myself but I also help facilitate a pain support group which actually was started off by a patient and Feeling Connected helped with this, so there’s a lot of people that suffer with chronic pain throughout the country. So chronic pain can be- generally it’s used as a term that for anyone that’s suffering with pain, it lasts over three months. So that’s kind of the loose effect of that, but loose, you know, kind of terminology, I would say. So acute pain is something kind of that’s very instant. So if we’re crossing the road, got knocked over and you broke your leg, that’s more of an acute pain and hopefully it will go away. But chronic pain is something that we unfortunately have to learn to live with as well. And chronic pain can be something like fibromyalgia. It can be someone that’s suffering with MS, you know, back pain, all sorts.

Louis
Yeah, I have a couple of friends in my life who have been recently diagnosed with- like you said, with fibromyalgia, MS, and another friend with endometriosis. So just seeing, you know, people my age just have like chronic pain conditions like that are really affecting them is like, I guess it’s something you never really… is something that at least I had never really had lived experience of or seen my loved ones go through and seeing it’s, yeah, it’s difficult. It really is something that like, I think people might not be super aware of.

Karen
Absolutely. So I think we kind of just live with it and kind of, what can I say, it’s there in society, but we probably don’t pay too much attention to the ripple effects of chronic pain because we just kind of get on with things, don’t we, in life, until, you know, myself or other professionals that work in that kind of field, when we see them every day you actually do pay attention to the person that’s walking down the street with a stick or… you’re already in their head and wondering what’s going on with them. So I had a patient that had a long-term back condition and it affected their life. significantly to the point that the job that they were doing, a very successful business and this business that they had, they had to give up. It was a manual business. So that spiralled into loneliness, isolation-

Louis
Sure.

Karen
-lots of ripple effects of finances, which I’m sure you can imagine can be anything up to someone losing the home that they live in. Relationships breaking down and then we spiral down and down and down and then depression kicks in and all the time you’re dealing with all of that you’ve got the chronic pain to live with as well and chronic pain can be so debilitating that people do not want to get up in the morning and when they live with that every single day you know there comes a point in some people’s lives that- I know this is very blunt- but they don’t want to be here anymore. They kind of think, what the hell am I going to do? Who’s going to pick me up? What can I do? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? So imagine having everything taken over for you, which happens a lot with people with chronic pain, or your independence. Oh, that’s huge. I have a patient that has MS who had a fantastic job, a great lifestyle and then has had MS and as that has progressed unfortunately, is now living in a wheelchair with four carers a day, lives in a house that they paid for themselves, you know, and has no real need to kind of go out or want to go out. So for example, they actually come to this pain support but this gentleman has kind of set up with myself with some help. So we kind of, so for the example with that, just how Feeling Connected help is kind of helping them along the way to say, actually, you know what? We’re gonna give you a little bit of finance to start that up, which was 75 pounds. Now, not a lot of money, but you got that up and off and, you know, in the community, gets going, it’s a group that happens once a fortnight. And for example, the client that’s got MS now goes to that group, which took a huge, from my kind of social prescribing, took a huge kind of effort to do. So that’s just one of many. So that group started with 8 people and just literally a couple of months down the line they’re now sat on 40 something. So, and this is without advertising by the way. So for that particular group they’re not advertising yet because… The scale of chronic fatigue is huge and they really do need some more probably more significant backing to be able to support that amount of people, you know, like IT issues and things like that, as you know yourself, you know, being able to have a screen that can project to and things like that. So Feeling Connected has helped get that off the ground. So that’s gone from… there’s a lots of little ripple effects with this. So that’s gone from one person having a conversation with me to kind of getting it to eight people sitting around a table and saying yeah this is what we want, to having a group that happens- with professionals by the way- so they have collaborations of professionals coming in and doing speeches, lead pharmacists going, we have people in the holistic kind of profession that comes along and does talks, you know we even end with a little meditation at the end. All sorts of it happens in that group. So here you have this one particular guy that was really down, really kind of depressed, and at the point where he was ready to give up in life, as in kind of ready to throw in the towel and think- having those thoughts of not wanting to be here anymore, what’s the point of life? So you have the two sides of the sword and the fact that It’s given him kind of the empowerment. It’s given him a will to want to do things again. So now he’s growing a different business aside of the pain support group. But also it’s having the ripple effect of 40 other people that are now coming to the group that feel that they’re connected that with people that understand. So you said lived experience earlier, I picked up on that and that is so key, Louis. If you have two people in a room that have got the same lived experience, oh my gosh, it’s better than having a half an hour chat with a clinician that has never lived that experience and- not pulling down what a clinician does, but-

Louis
I guess it’s in those shared experiences that you do see communities develop.

Karen
Yes!

Louis
I mean, I was interested in what you said earlier about the patient you were referencing as kind of like almost like a case study for the whole point of this conversation.

Karen
Yes.

Louis
Isolation and loneliness be it like, through mental struggles or physical impairment, you know with things such as chronic pain and MS and other conditions such as that, it is just such a snowball effect you know? I feel like over the course of this podcast I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who have gone through experiences like that or worked with people going through experiences like that such as yourself, and I think losing your support- financial and social and personal it just gets you so bad doesn’t it? It really is the thing from which all these other issues kind of expand.

Karen
Yeah absolutely, so you take someone with MS or MND or something like that, you know they go, there’s different levels of that and there’s different kind of- obviously again no two people will… they’ll have similarities but they’ll be very person-centred to themselves as in you know- the effect that ripples effect they have in the life. Some people might have MS and they have a husband and children at home that are there and supporting. Some may have MS that it’s affected the life so much that they’ve not only lost their job, they’ve lost their partnership, they’ve lost their children, they’ve lost all their friends because their friends have still physically been able to go out. So slowly those friendships disappear as well because… they stop inviting the one that can’t get there as quick and as well as anybody else and then eventually when that life becomes kind of in a wheelchair, you know, unfortunately we are quite a selfish kind of, race in the fact that we perhaps won’t think that we’re going to… I don’t mean to say this in general, but somewhere in town that has got those facilities that we can take our friend that’s in a wheelchair for. Now you might think, oh well that’s quite selfish of those people to think that way. Unfortunately it’s life and it kind of, they develop a new life or a new understanding of my life is now in these four walls in a wheelchair and I can’t even get upstairs anymore. How on Earth am I going to get to the shop? Even that’s difficult, Louis. You know, you get to a motorized wheelchair. You try going through the cobbles of Chesterfield in a wheelchair. It’s tough.

Louis
Oh, yeah, no, my Grandmother, my Grandma has quite severe arthritis and she recently started using a crutch.

Karen
Yes, yeah.

Louis
And it’s a very large process for her, but she even, again, just in Chesterfield town centre, just a tiny little town centre in this country, she just can’t use the wheelchair that she has there because it’s just so frustrating and painful and inaccessible, you know. To do that without a support network, which she has, you know, she’s part of quite a few little communities and stuff. She doesn’t really feel loneliness to the extent that I think we’re talking about that a great many people. But I can’t imagine just kind of going through that. And you don’t have, you know, you don’t have the husband with you to help you out. You don’t have the friends who are willing to kind of make adjustments to your disabilities. I’m very fortunate that I can’t imagine that but I think it’s in talking to people such as yourself and hearing about the good work done by you the efforts to bring people together done by projects such as Feeling Connected and- of course- The Chesterfield Community Roast.

Karen
Yes Yeah.

Louis
I see that like just how vital it is to be around people, you know, I think while it’s hard to blame people for kind of being selfish in the sense of ‘Oh, okay, well this person said they didn’t want to impose so I guess we’ll just do this thing without them’ and how that can spiral into losing touch with that friend and leading them down a very difficult path. I think we’re very social animals and I think we inherently want to see people together, we want to be together.

Karen
Yes, yes.

Louis
I think that’s why these projects are important, why work like what you do as a social prescriber is important and now more than ever.

Karen
Oh, absolutely, 100% so important and I’m not saying just, you know, not just my job, everybody in the community. You know, it’s huge and unfortunately a lot of these people get left behind. And I always say to people, you are not your diagnosis. You are so much more than a diagnosis of MS or whatever it might be. There’s a person behind those four wheels and that chair that you sit that goes down the street. There’s a person behind that. And we have people, I spoke to a patient recently actually who was in a supermarket with a carer and they were in their wheelchair and they literally do have carers with them 24 seven. And I will not name the supermarket, but they went to a supermarket and the cashier spoke to the carer and not the person.

Louis
I see, yeah. That’s a frustrating thing, it has to be.

Karen
Yeah, it was very frustrating.

Louis
Not seeing you as having your own agency just because you’re disabled.

Karen
Yeah, and it really upset them. And it continued. It wasn’t just kind of, ‘that’s £24.99, where’s your card-‘ it was kind of looking at the carer to pay when the person’s quite capable of paying themselves just because they’re in a chair or have a disability it doesn’t mean to say that they cannot produce a bank card and tap it on the WiFi bit, whatever it’s called, and it’s even down to when they say thank you, yet again it’s almost like ‘thank you!’ and it’s to the carer and not to the person in the chair. And what happened with that card is they handed it back to the carer. So it’s… You know, it’s things like that, those simple little things that we need to almost educate society with and maybe there’s some learning around that and, you know, around how big organisations not on purpose, but how we treat others.

Louis
Oh, of course, I think that’s something that I see every day working with Kakou, the idea that we do have such ways to go in just changing the way people understand disabilities and access needs, you know, the way people, the idea of seeing accessible access needs and disabilities and conditions, it’s like, it’s something that people have, it’s not something that they are.

Karen
Absolutely, yeah.

Louis
You said it, you got it exactly right. Yeah. There is someone, there is a person here, no matter what immediate, outdated kind of ideas you might have about the agency and personality of this person that is still a human being. And I think understanding does need to change massively before anything else can.

Karen
Absolutely. I mean, you can imagine being, I don’t mean this in a rude way- but kind of being gagged, put in a chair and took to a supermarket to go buy your weekly groceries and no matter how much you want to speak or, you know, engage with someone, they completely ignore you. It’s, it’s, and then in fact, so it’s happening, what happens to the person in that chair? or whatever the situation might be. I’m just using this as a kind of a loose way of describing it. Because there’s so many different disabilities out there that are hidden as well. So imagine being ignored, imagine being kind of, you know, almost frowned upon or looked upon as not being in existence. Underneath that, that person has emotions and feelings that are really valid and really important. And the ripple effect society constantly, almost battering them, makes that person feel so isolated. And then they just become isolated. So reducing isolation, getting social interaction, being completely inclusive as much as we possibly can is so important. You know, we should be able to give the person that’s blind the same treatment as the person that can see perfectly well.

Louis
Of course, yeah.

Karen
You know, what difference does it make? That is still a living, well-capable person and there’s some fantastic people there that have got degrees, education, have set up their own business. I know a lady that’s wrote a book, you know, you would haven’t even kind of probably put that context within this person you kind of think, well, you know, ex-professionals as well that have had a condition that’s completely wiped them out and unfortunately have to live a different life. And we seem to forget that they are capable of doing the same as you and I. And to be honest with you, because they carry so much passion, I think they’re even more capable because they have that drive to do things, really do.

Louis
So it all comes back doesn’t it, it just all comes back to making people feel like part of something, making them feel together, not removing anyone’s agency, not taking away any freedom like social or physical.

Karen
Yes.

Louis
It really is, it comes back to just how these things can isolate people.

Karen
Touching on-

Louis
So-

Karen
Go on, sorry, I’m interrupting. (Laughs)

Louis
No, no! Go on. (Laughs)

Karen
So touching on that and exactly what you said, this is exactly why Feeling Connected is so important because with their help and support, it’s got lots of things going in the community. So I, funnily enough, came across, again, I had a patient with autism who was very lonely and very isolated and had a couple of other disabilities, but let’s kind of just generalise that, I introduced this particular patient, which took a long time, believe me, to a charity called Macintyre, which is a learning disability charity.

Louis
Yeah, I know Macintyre.

Karen
So through that introduction, I met some wonderful people, and this is how the Community Roast developed.

Louis
Yes, I was going to say, we’ve been talking for- it doesn’t feel like it but half an hour now-

Karen
No way? Sorry. (Laughs)

Louis
No! Don’t be sorry, it’s an interesting conversation. But I was just saying, if you wanted to talk about the work that you do with the Chesterfield Community Roast, because it’s a project that we at Kakou are very involved in with, you know, and the marketing of and the running of.

Karen
Yes.

Louis
If you wanted to talk a little bit about that, because I know it’s something that’s really dear to you.

Karen
Oh gosh, yes. So, yeah, it really is. It’s like a family now. It really is a little family. So I took a patient, like, say, to Macintyre and upon that, you know when you just click with someone? There’s a lovely lady called Michelle, Michelle Wilkinson, and we had a conversation and we just clicked and we were talking- it was you know not long out of Covid- we were talking about loneliness and isolation so and the conversation just went from 10 minutes a bit pretty much like this one to half an hour and neither of us could get a word in edgeways because we were so infused about things that we perhaps could do in the community. (Laughs) So we arranged a meeting and it was in the little library at Swanwick Hall at Whittington, and there was a few people in that meeting at the time from Macintyre and a guy from Rethink called Mark Hudson and myself, Michelle. And we, myself and Michelle, were battering ideas around and then we came up with the Community Roast. And it was a very kind of loose chat, let me put it that way. We were, do you know what was lovely about it? We were all very enthusiastic. kind of people that were very driven, both Michelle and myself, in making this happen. And everybody got enthused probably with the Roast- they had no choice. (Laughs)

Louis
(Laughs)

Karen
And, you know, within a couple of weeks, the Roast was kind of, ‘yeah, let’s do it, we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it, right, we’re on board, we’re off, and we’re away!’ And we literally opened the doors to the community once a month. Sunday, the second Sunday of every month at Swanwick Hall. Now unfortunately that kind of had a little bit of change of management and we were no longer able to use that hall, so you can imagine we’d gone from a small conversation to be able to have originally probably 40-50 people in a room that were that were made up- this was what was so lovely- we’re made up of people that were blind, people that were disabled, people that had learning disabilities, you know, ordinary people that were struggling with finance locally, so that kind of come together of community of all ages, and I’m talking from three or four years old right up into their eighties and nineties, from all different aspects of life, you know, from care homes, people that lived and were isolated on their own, elderly people. so many conversations and we had a theme every month and we just rolled with it and we got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then it came to Christmas- not this Christmas just gone, the Christmas before and we recognised that a lot of these people that we kindly serve lunches up to, and it takes a lot to make those lunches as I’m sure you will know. There’s a collaboration of people that are involved with that we had to engage with and build relationships and trust and all sorts that goes off behind the scenes. But we got to a point and it was kind of our October roast and we were kind of, what are these guys going to do at Christmas? A lot of these people have got nowhere to go. So we decided that we would do Christmas Day. And it was absolutely-

(Recording sessions ends.)

Louis
The word Karen was going to say there, before she was cut off because we could not salvage her recording, was ‘amazing’. And that’s because the Chesterfield Community Roast really is amazing, it does good work every single month to support struggling families, the elderly, children and disabled people to have a space place to meet new people, socialise, stay warm and to have a wholesome, well-made, full dinner in a time where a lot of people could really use that. So, if you’re interested in volunteering for the Community Roast, supporting it, or even just attending, please make sure to check out The Chesterfield Community Roast Facebook page and stay tuned to the KakouTechUK social media platforms everywhere for information on upcoming events and Chesterfield Community Roast Sundays. So, despite the technical issues, I really hope you enjoyed this episode. From myself, Louis, at Kakou Technologies, and from Karen Lawson, see you next time.

End.