News

Barnet Health Champions: Meet Fatima

21st November 2022

Fatima is a Barnet Health Champion who has been a part of the project from the very beginning. Fatima lives in Barnet and is a recently retired medical publisher and writer, who focused mainly on health education and medical conference planning.

Fatima became a Health Champion through a focus group that she was invited to which centred on Health in Barnet. Fatima was keen to “share [her] knowledge and experience and give back to the community”.

In the midst of the pandemic, Fatima was keen to understand more about COVID-19 as she already had a network of people who turned to her for information and the Health Champions were a great way to keep up with the data and information surrounding COIVD-19. Over the last 5 years, she worked on a journal on virus eradication, which was most relevant during the pandemic when new data was vital to our knowledge about developing the vaccine against COVID- 19.

“COVID-19 made us turn to the community so much more and you got to know your neighbours”.

Fatima is able to support her community by using the information that she gains from Info Sessions, sharing it with friends and family and the neighbourhood watch scheme, especially via the infographics, which standardise the information being disseminated. This helped to remove personal opinions when having conversations around health.

Fatima enjoys being a part of the Health Champions programme, bringing the community together and working towards important health matters. Fatima presented to the Health and Wellbeing Board after the first year of the programme and said:

“It was good to pull together and showcase the work of the Health Champions with all that we had achieved in such a short time”.

When asked to sum up the Health Champions in three words, Fatima said:

Information, Community and Health.

If you would like to volunteer as a Barnet Health Champion, email us on: enquiry@volunteeringbarnet.org.uk, or you can search our database here to find other Barnet volunteering roles!