In conversation with Sara Geater, Specialised Commissioning, NHS England
It’s our business to communicate well and we love it. We enjoy striking up conversations with people who live or work across different cultures.
For this post, we hear from Sara Geater, who’s a Senior Engagement Manager with NHS England. In her work for the National Support Team, Specialised Commissioning, she gathers opinions and evidence on cutting edge treatments, so her team can evaluate whether the NHS – and the taxpayer – is justified in spending money on them.
It’s often a politically charged area, because Specialised Commissioning focuses on treatments for relatively small numbers of people with very rare conditions: low volume, high cost. Sara has to make sure that everyone affected – patients, experts, interested charities - has the chance to have their say.
That desire to ensure that everyone has input, everyone has a voice, has underpinned every stage of Sarah’s career. That journey started in the Himalayas.
‘She was breaking a boulder into little rocks so she could feed her children’.
After Sara finished her degree in peace studies with politics and conflict resolution, she went travelling for about 18 months:
“I went to Asia. And I was working in a boys’ home and school where my parents have always sponsored children at this boys’ home and school. I went and worked there for a month or so, in the hills of the Himalayas.
“And I was reading at the time Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, about his time in prison. The thing that the apartheid regime gave them, to make them feel less human, was chipping big boulders into small stones. That kind of was the punishment that the regime gave them, to sit in the hot sun and do this job.
“And I went for a walk around in the mountains where I was working, and I came across this lady who had a baby on her back and a toddler sat next to her, and she was crouched down with a little hammer breaking a boulder into little rocks so she could feed her children. And I think that that for me was the time when I really understood just how inequitable this world is.
‘That was probably the turning point. I want people to feel part of society.’
“And I think that never left me really. And when the world seems unfair, I always think back to that lady, what she did to feed her child was the same punishment as they gave Mandela to make him feel less human. And I think that that’s kind of what drives me on, that image of that woman that I passed by in the Himalayas.
“And I think that was probably the turning point for me, which made me think, ‘I’m going to challenge this. I want people to have a voice. I want people to feel accountable and people to feel part of society, because I think that’s how we get a better society and for people to feel part of it.”
‘I think naturally I am a bit of an activist.’
When Sara returned to the UK, her career began in East Sussex. She was taken on to be a PALS co-ordinator. (PALS stands for ‘Patient Adviser Liaison Service’). At the time – 2002 – it was a new and bold idea. Sara was employed to set it up for two primary care trusts in East Sussex, spanning Hastings, Rother, Downs and Weald:
“It was all about customer service in the NHS, which hadn’t existed prior to that as a format in its own right. And as the notion of public accountability and public participation started to grow within NHS policy, it was kind of the natural place where it sat.
“PALS was very much about individuals. The thing that struck me, was most people were really supportive of the NHS, but it doesn’t always go well. But when it didn’t go well there was really no outlet just to say, “This didn’t go well and shouldn’t it be better and can we not make it better?”
“So actually most people didn’t want to complain, didn’t want anyone to get into trouble, weren’t out for revenge or anything. They just wanted to make it better. PALS was about really activating improvement in the service.
“And I was in a position where if I did my job well, then we could make that happen. We could turn that learning and that insight into improvement and making it better and making it work better for everybody.
“If I think back 12 or 13 years ago, where there wasn’t even a concept of public accountability so much, certainly not public participation and decision making, to where we are now, where if you don’t do it you end up being caught because everyone expects you to do it, I think we’ve advance a really long way. But I think that there’s even further to go.”
In our next conversation with Sara, we look at how the demands being made on community interpreters led to the birth of bilingual advocacy…
Vandu Language Services is based in Lewes, Sussex and has been helping organisations overcome the language barrier since 1999. We provide interpreting, translation, bilingual advocacy and cross cultural training for when you need to communicate clearly across cultures.
