Our Covid Community Champions Posted on 04 October 2021 By Leyton Wands, Community Enabler and Covid Community Champion, Oldham KeyRing supports vulnerable adults within the community and promotes independence. We support people with learning disabilities and autism and have been helping them with their issues and concerns around Covid and the vaccine. We have also been helping those in the community that do not have any support services in place. We have achieved this by joining the Oldham Council engagement team each week and going door to door. This has been really helpful for many people. We have been using social media to promote having the vaccine and offering support to the wider community. Having conversations around the myths that have been going around on and off social media has been really helpful to those we have come across while offering support. The myths have been a struggle for many people especially those with learning disabilities and autism as they have expressed concerns of what to believe and who to trust when information is being given. This is still a challenge we face and have been coming up with awareness sessions to tackle the false information. We have an online hub every week where we run a monthly session around different issues to help those that may struggle to understand what to believe. KeyRing have been offering support with lateral flow tests doing video sessions of how to do them for people to follow along as well as face to face support for those that find this difficult. Many people have started to test regularly thanks to this and do not find it frightening or unbearable as they once did. We have been reaching out to GP surgeries to offer support with their patients that have learning disabilities and autism. We are hopeful that we can set up a partnership soon to reach even more vulnerable people. We have joined in with the engagement team with promoting the vaccine bus and have arranged for more people to come down and get their vaccine. This is a brief description of what KeyRing have been doing. With much more to be done still. Find out more about our work in Oldham.