In this project, we wanted to see if we could reach out to teenagers in an area of high risk to find out what their experience of knife crime is. That is, the experience of people who are not perpetrators or victims of knife crime.

We spoke with James Kingsland. Professor Kingsland is a Primary Care Physician; Clinical Professor, School of Medicine, University of Central Lancashire; an Independent Healthcare Adviser; National Clinical Lead Complete Care Community Programme; Chair Digital Clinical Excellence Forum (DiCE) UK. We spoke about how our recruitment service could help for this important project.

What were you trying to achieve? 

We were trying to identify a specific segment of the population to focus our project on. It was related to health inequalities. We wanted to see if nativve’s approach could help us to define a health segment with a particular risk profile. In our case we were looking at groups that were hard to reach or who don’t normally interact with health services. For example, if I was trying to find over 65s with type 2 diabetes who have had high blood pressure in the last 6 months, that would be easy. Because our health systems in the UK code for this sort of thing. But if I want to ask how many teenagers go to school in London in fear of knife crime, where would you even start? So in this project, we wanted to see if we could reach out to teenagers in an area of high risk to find out what their experience of knife crime is. That is, the experience of people who are not perpetrators or victims of knife crime.

How did the project work? 

Using nativve’s approach, not only were we able to reach these teenagers, but we were also able to get them to complete a semi-structured questionnaire. What we discovered is that almost all kids in the area we studied are leaving home frightened. In other words, we discovered a wellness epidemic with far more impact than the numbers of teenagers directly impacted by knife crime. This has a real impact on population health management in this area of London.

What do you like about nativve’s method?

By definition, we are working with hard to reach populations. Or people unidentified to the health system. This gives us a big problem to overcome. If you can’t identify a group, how can you develop a service to help them? Using this approach we could actively reach out in a language that the people understand. We call it language empathy. That allowed us to create the right interactions with people. To use the sorts of interactions that they are using on platforms that they like to use. We couldn’t have identified and engaged them better any other way. And we now have a much deeper understanding of them, their needs and what services might help them. 

Get in touch with us to discuss how we can help with your recruitment needs.