One Hackney: let’s get together and feel all right

Paula Yassine Garden Manager of St Mary’s with a guest.

“There’s something inherently fulfilling about nurturing a plant from the seed and watching it grow – looking after it,” says Noushine Nozari, a horticultural therapist at St Mary’s Secret Garden.

“If you do that you get a sense of satisfaction that you’ve done something, you’ve looked after it, nurtured it – and if at the end you can get a pot of jam out of it all the better.”

St Mary’s is a small organisation that offers ‘eco-therapy’, which in this case means gardening as a means for improving mental health. It is one of the beneficiaries of One Hackney and City, a new project connecting community support services with big health institutions such as Homerton Hospital and St Joseph’s Hospice.

The idea behind the project is to bring “integrated health and social care” into the borough by harnessing the ability of smaller organisations to be more flexible than larger ones.

The voluntary groups involved are being coordinated by Hackney Council for Voluntary Service (HCVS), the umbrella group for charities and similar groups in the borough.

Project leader Josh Fergeus is excited by what the groups he works with will be able to bring to the project.

“We’re really tapping into what the voluntary sector does well, what it has to offer. We are able to be really responsive,” he says.

Small groups, often run by charities, can devote more time to thinking about individuals’ needs, argues Fergeus. They can also provide people who need care and support with more options.

“We can stop things getting worse when they don’t have to,” Fergeus says.

As a voluntary sector provider, St Mary’s will receive funding from One Hackney every time it provides services to a One Hackney client. This money comes from the budget for health and social care services in Hackney, distributed by the City and Hackney Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

Patients and social care clients can ask to be referred to One Hackney by their GP or nurse if they want temporary help, or if they want to address a particular issue that existing services can’t offer.

Jennifer Walker, programme director of One Hackney, loves this sort of joined-up working. “The really fantastic thing about One Hackney is the involvement of the voluntary sector,” she says.

“Any patient who comes to One Hackney can have access to all the voluntary sector organisations, helping to meet their needs alongside the main health and care system.”

Additional options mean it’s possible to treat clients’ needs more holistically.

“When we take a patient in One Hackney we look at their whole situation. We don’t just look at their health condition, we look at their housing situation, their social care needs. You don’t just address one need in isolation, you address how all of them interact.

“If they’re socially isolated and that’s impacting on their health and wellbeing, we can address the health needs but we can also do work around finding them friends, with help from social activities like lunch clubs.”

At St Mary’s Secret Garden, the complex needs of clients are met by relatively simple activities such as sowing seeds, planting vegetables and taking cuttings.

“For some clients it might be about reducing the social isolation that they’re experiencing – they’re now out leaving their homes in a new environment with other people, doing activities with other people, so they get that social contact again. For some of our clients, that’s a major issue,” says Nozari.

“From one week to the next, the garden is always changing, different plants: one finishes, others come up. In a city it’s very important to have that contact with nature.”

This article is published as part of a Community Partnership between the Hackney Citizen and Hackney CVS