A COVID volunteer group is holding a webinar today as it campaigns for people affected in BAME communities.

The Sheffield Contact Community Group (SCCT) webinar will be held at 4pm to discuss the latest information on COVID 19 and vaccinations.

Paul Redgrave, 68, former Public Health Director of South Yorkshire, is one of seven founders of SCCT and will be introducing the webinar.

“The idea of helping communities is to become more COVID confident and COVID resilient.”

The webinar will be led by Dr Alex Rawlings, Professor Nick Payne, and Dr Charles Heatley. They will be telling more about their experiences vaccinating the public.

Webinars are hosted every other Tuesday. They are open to the public and are mostly attended by volunteers and activists.

Their most recent webinar focused on mental health during lockdown in collaboration with MAAN (Somali Mental Health Sheffield) and Sheffield Samaritans. It is available on their website.

SCCT was set up by retired health professionals with the Heeley Trust in  March 2020 to train volunteers for contact tracing. However after the Government began their track and trace scheme, they became a campaign group for communities in Sheffield during the Pandemic.

Dr Redgrave said that they have successfully trained 25 volunteers.

“It’s a phenomenal organisation.

“All of our working lives we have tried to make a difference and suddenly in this big world of COVID we’ve been able to.”

The group was originally set up to train people as Covid 19 contact tracers.

It aims to help Sheffield residents who need to self isolate and are particularly concerned with those affected in minority areas.

It followed COVID guidelines given by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which are different to those used by the UK Government.

The group has been successful in their project to help volunteers train and were published multiple times in the British Medical Journal.

The have work with multiple organisations, including Sheffield Council, Sheffield CCG and Darnall Wellbeing.

In the future, the group hopes to take the scheme to the NHS, Public Health England and Local Authorities.

You can register for the event here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/140863569729

More information about SCCT is on their website: https://www.communitycontacttracers.com/