GupShup and beyond: Connecting with Pakistani Muslim communities

Naureen Khan, Engagement and Quality Officer for St Luke’s Hospice in Sheffield, is passionate about her work. She’s been in the role since it was created eight years ago and says that since then, “it’s been no looking back.”

The position was introduced when St Luke’s staff realised they needed to engage more with their wider community. Sheffield is a very diverse city, but the hospice wasn’t seeing this reflected in the people using their services.

To address the disparity, the team needed to find out why people weren’t using services. Naureen explains:

“I think this is where engagement was really important. [Finding out] where the barriers are, how we can make it more accessible.”

When Naureen first started her role, she wasn’t sure where to start. She carried out a mapping exercise to help her identify the largest ethnic minority in their area: the Pakistani community.

The biggest proportion of this community is Muslim. As such, a lot of Naureen’s work focuses specifically on engaging with this group. However, Naureen highlights that this community encompasses many different religions:

“The culture will be the same except for the religion will be different, and probably the language will be the same. So I have to be very sensitive when I work around people that it is not just about one group that I’m supporting – that everybody feels included.”

St Luke’s tries to make sure everyone feels welcome to use their services. The Pakistani community is just one of the groups that St Luke’s has made efforts to engage with.

Before any talk of services or available resources, the first step was to get to know the community. Naureen likens it to forming a friendship:

“That’s really important because it’s like, even when you move to a new place, you find out your surroundings, you find out your neighbours. You get to know them and they get to know you. That’s how friendships are formed.”

Part of this involved understanding the level of knowledge the community already held about hospice care. The team also wanted to know what people knew about St Luke’s Hospice specifically.

The hospice answered these questions with a short survey:

“We fairly quickly found out that there is, it’s not really a language barrier, it’s more of an educational barrier to start off with.”

Once Naureen knew this, she and the hospice team could get to work.

Naureen explains that there can be a lot of stigma around hospice and end of life care within the Muslim community. She says there is “sensitivity around using medication or getting support […] and staying in a hospice.” Some people in this community may see receiving hospice care as against their religion.

An important part of her role is mythbusting these misconceptions.

When tackling these myths Naureen likes to know her audience. She tells us it’s “really important to find out whether people are more cultural or people are more religious”. Knowing where people’s beliefs come from help her to articulate things in a way they understand.

For example, if she knows a person is more religious, she can draw on examples from the sources they believe in to show them that receiving support is okay.

A big part of Naureen’s myth busting efforts focus on charity shops. She explains that many people in the Pakistani community don’t like to shop in charity shops.

Through her work, Naureen has seen similar thoughts among other local communities, like the Chinese community.

Learning that these perceptions were so widespread encouraged her to start running workshops on what charity shops actually are and where the money goes.

She says that educating people in this way has helped a lot:

“I see a great uptake in people using our charity shops as well browsing. And then being proud about it and letting me know that ‘I bought this in your charity shop’. So it’s nice to hear that and to see that it’s actually working.”