Welcome to Women’s Health and Family Services
WHFS is a community-based health advocacy organisation with 29 years experience of working with Black and Ethnic Minority women and their families to tackle health inequalities in the broadest sense.
WHFS provides a range of health advocacy and related services and is committed to promoting health education and awareness more generally, developing illness prevention strategies, tackling disadvantage and the affects of poverty, and taking a ‘whole-family’ approach to empowering families to improve their health, well-being and quality of life.
Volunteers Wanted
Diabetes Befriending Project is an exciting project
That recruits Bengali & Somali speaking volunteers to
Help & support patients living with type 2
Diabetes in Tower Hamlets.
Are you diabetic or know someone who is diabetic?
If yes we want to hear from you.
Benefits of becoming a volunteer:
• Receive full training
• One to one support
• Out of pocket expenses (travel)
• Certificate of attendance and reference provided
Venue: Meeting room, The Brady Centre,192 to 196 Hanbury Street, E1 5HU
Time: 10:00 am to 1 pm
To book for an interview or to find out more, please contact Nurun or Jasmin on
02073778725 / 07960 328099 / 0796032776
Could you volunteer your time to become a birth partner?
The WHFS volunteer Maternity Mates Project is an exciting and rewarding project, providing FREE accredited training to volunteers, enabling them to support women through the latter stages of pregnancy & childbirth and for the first 6 weeks of family life.The volunteers will:
- Provide individual support for isolated and vulnerable women and their families.
- Promote the benefits of antenatal care, breastfeeding and smoking cessation to en-sure these women have knowledge around all options available to them, feel empow-ered to make their own decisions and there-fore have the best possible birth outcome and the healthiest possible start in life for their child.
- Build links between midwifery services and the voluntary and community sector, devel-oping positive working relationships.
- Listen to the needs of local women from dis-advantaged communities, ensuring we are meeting these needs.
What is a Maternity Mate?
A Maternity Mate is a female volunteer that is fully trained to provide emotional and practical support to women that are in need during pregnancy, childbirth and the early weeks of family life.
They can offer one on one practical and emo-tional support from the 6th month of preg-nancy, be with you at the birth and for 6 weeks after the baby is born. However maternity mate offers no clinical skills and does not per-form any medical tasks.
All of our volunteer Maternity Mates receive a FREE extensive training program…….
1) 6 * 3 hour sessions covering….
- Pregnancy support
- Cultural Diversity
- The Fathers’ Role
- Post-natal care
- Child protection level 1
- Domestic Violence Awareness and more…
3) A 2-day Breastfeeding course
4) Accredited to level 2 and 3 with the Open Col-lege Network
5) Ongoing monthly training sessions and support following training.
Benefits to having a Maternity Mate......
- Continuous emotional and practical support before, and after, baby is born.
- Accompany you to hospital appointments.
- Attend antenatal appointments and classes with you.
- Providing information and support with plan-ning your birth.
- Information and support around breastfeeding.
- Continuous support at the time of the birth which can make the labour a more positive experience.
- Accompany you to your local children’s centre and mum & baby groups.
Jasmin Begum or Lepa Rahman
Women’s Health and Family Services
The Brady Centre
192-196 Hanbury Street
London
E1 5HU
Tel: 020 7377 8725
Mob: 0796 0327 760 / 07960 328198
Fax: 020 7377 1064
E-mail: Jasmin.Begum@whfs.org.uk / lepar@whfs.org.uk