This week marks a significant moment in the ongoing COVID-19 Inquiry, focusing on the Care Sector from 30 June to 31 July 2025, as part of Module 6.

It is crucial that we do not forget the immense challenges faced during the pandemic — especially by those working tirelessly within care settings, as well as the deaf and disabled communities and their carers.

We want to extend our deepest thanks to all those who are giving evidence this week, including many of our colleagues and friends. Their dedication to advocating, influencing policy, and sharing lived experiences shines a vital light on the realities of the pandemic. It’s these voices — the people at the heart of the crisis — that hold the key to understanding and learning from this moment in history.

At People’s Voice Media, we are proud to have contributed to this important conversation through our work exploring the experiences of deaf and disabled people and carers during COVID-19. Our report and video testimonies reveal the resilience, challenges, and strength of communities often overlooked in mainstream narratives.

We invite you to read our full report and watch these powerful videos. By listening to and sharing these lived experiences, we help ensure that future policies are truly informed by those they impact most.

The lessons of COVID-19 are still unfolding, but one thing is clear: the stories of people matter. Let us keep listening.

Explore our report and videos here:  

• #NationalCareForum
• #NCF
• #SocialCare
• #CareSector
• #CareProviders
• #CareQuality
• #SocialCareSupport
• #CareWorkforce
• #CareReform
• #AdultSocialCare

The  report to the COVID Inquiry has now been completed. It has been sent to the COVID Inquiry team and you can access the report here. Below you have a summary of some of the key points and links to the conversations that PVM had with people, to give you a preview of what the report includes. 

Links to extracts from 6 of the 22 participants

Keymn explains why having an understanding of the value of lived and living experience is training that healthcare professionals must have.

Miro explains why society has to re-think and understand disability differently.

Amanda tells us why COVID information was not fully accessible for Deaf people and what could have been done differently. 

Andy explains to Isaac the reasons for involving people with lived and living experiences.

Hameed discusses both the positive and negative aspects of the pandemic.

Baroness Brinton talks about health and social care problems that were highlighted during the pandemic.

Links to full conversations with all participants

The PVM process starts with individuals narrating their experiences, facts and feelings. We did this by talking to 22 people as part of the joint work with DRUK, so that the lived experiences of Deaf and Disabled people could be input to the COVID Inquiry.

There was one point in the process, where the information given by individuals seemed overwhelming. This was partly because everything felt important and relevant, but also because the task of determining key themes seemed a difficult or limiting process.  For example, when it felt as though every point people made was important, it then seemed like we might be trivialising the topic if we tried to distil it to a few main aspects.

However, the PVM process means that meaning emerges, although this doesn’t happen by magic.  We listen and highlight what we think is important. We might colour code, group together or count how often topics are talked about. We also consider how frequently a contributor might return to talk about a lived experience, as an indication of how strongly they feel about the issue.

For the COVID Inquiry work, we began with some open questions to allow people to give their lived and living experiences in a broad way and in their own words. As the work progressed, and by the time we had recorded 10 narratives, we were able to include some more focussed questions, e.g. Other people have said _____, did you find this was the same for you or what was your experience of this? There was definitely the need to balance the open questions against more focussed ones, because we did not want to lead the participants down a specific route, but we were aware that being able to give the COVID Inquiry team specific details would be important.

In the report we’ve included direct quotations from many of the people who shared their lived experiences. Where necessary, we’ve also offered explanations, based on the conversations and online sense making workshops we held. This is because we wanted to clarify for the Inquiry why particular aspects were different or difficult for Deaf and Disabled people. The key points from the report are:

·  There was confusing and frightening information from national government and local authorities to Deaf and Disabled people.

·  COVID both highlighted and exacerbated existing systemic problems and Inequalities (including racism, ageism and ableism) within statutory services

·  Even though there is legislation, little understanding exists about Deaf and Disabled people’s needs.The report is comprehensive and has had an emotional impact on some readers. We hope it will give people’s voices meaning so that the COVID Inquiry can make recommendations that will support Deaf and Disabled people, together with their carers. As Keymn Whervin stated in the foreword to the report: “The Inquiry must ensure that people affected by COVID have their voices heard, particularly in respect of how we co-produce health and social care”.

Isaac Samuels

Back in May, the EUARENAS project held its first Community of Practice (CoP) in-person session as part of a project meeting in Reggio Emilia. The CoP is made-up of folk from research, services, policy and communities across Europe and the group is interested in learning and developing their knowledge about how democracy works in local communities, and how citizens (in the broadest sense of the term – i.e., people who live in a place) and communities can be more involved in local democracy. As part of this session, we delivered an introductory activity that looked at the future of democracy in Europe – this blog shares with you some of the ideas from this session…

Democracy Now

When reflecting on what democracy feels like where they live and work, the CoP members noted points such as:

• Citizens feel removed from the political process – they perhaps don’t care or feel powerless to affect change 
• There was a sense that ‘European identity’ is being diminished 
• Growing complexity administration and bureaucracy causing blockages and disconnect 
• Truth and trust doesn’t feel valued 

A key question being posed, was is democracy really working? Are current structures really supporting the practice or principles of social equality – or are they unwittingly helping maintain inequalities? 

The future we’d like to see

Given that some of the points above point to a ‘crisis in democracy’, CoP members had some interesting ideas about how this could look very different. These ideas included:

• Citizens having more agency and involvement in democracy – moving to ‘deep democracy’, going beyond just voting and being involved in deliberation and decision-making 
• Having a ‘value-driven’ democracy 
• Local government with the competencies to support new ways of working with citizens and involving them in local democracy

Ideas for getting there

So, given that the CoP members would like to changes from the current situation, we spent some time thinking about how we might get there. Thinking and suggestions in this area were:

• Mainstreaming of existing practices such as participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, crowdsourced law – so that these become the new ‘status quo’
• Adopting test and learn approaches as a way that experimentation can be done and actively learned from
• Find ways of celebrating and connecting up the small changes that are taking place – this will help people see that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

The full results of this workshop will be combined with more detailed work done with residents of different cities across Europe to produce an insight briefing focusing on how people across Europe are currently experiencing democracy and their ideas for the future.

This will be released in Autumn 2022 – watch this space!

This week, members of the PVM team have been in Palermo, along with partners from the CONTINUE Project, to deliver training on Knowledge Exchange activities and share updates on work package progress. A representative from Gorse Hill Studios – our local partner based in Stretford, Greater Manchester – also joined us, for a week of shared learning and development.

We kicked off the week by exchanging key learnings from stakeholder interviews which partners had conducted with people in their local communities. The interviews were with a range of different people including teachers, youth workers and representatives from local government and explore their thoughts on how the COVID-19 Pandemic has impacted the lives of young people. Each partner presented the key learnings from each of the interviews, then we moved on to discussing how we could share this information with other people working in the field.

As part of the training, the group exchanged ideas for activities that could be used in the knowledge exchange event to facilitate discussion – ideas ranged from the Fishbowl technique to Focus Groups, creating safe spaces and World Café. We were then provided with a template session plan which each of us will adjust to suit the needs of the groups we’ll be working with.

Partners are now fully equipped to organise and deliver their knowledge exchange events. This stage of the project will be wrapped up by the end of September. Each partner will then write up a set of local policy briefings (using the learnings from the KE events) which will be shared in the hopes of influencing change.

A further Pan-European Knowledge Exchange event is set to take place by late November, combining the learnings from the local sessions and building further understandings – this will feed into a final Pan-European Policy briefing which is set to be released in the New Year.

The TNP took place the day after the training sessions and enabled partners to update on the progress of the project and discuss future plans.

Stay up to date with project happenings on the PVM blog and be sure to follow us on social media for more frequent updates. 

Last week PVM took part in a two day training workshop in Vilnius, Lithuania as part of the CONTINUE E+ Project.

Young mentors from across Europe came together – including Georgia, a Project Worker with PVM – to learn about mentoring and social actions. The training was facilitated by Active Youth and Artemisszio and included a range of interactive activities that helped broaden the mentor’s understanding of how to develop social actions with young people. The workshop consisted of step by step activities which helped them explore social issues, identify what impact these issues have, then produce their own social actions to combat the negative effects.

Hate speech, inequality in the workplace and discrimination towards refugees were all topics that the mentor’s explored. They even got the chance to put their ideas into practice, demonstrating their social actions in Vilnius town centre! The social actions ranged from street theatre, flyer campaigns and public discussions and helped the mentors to gain valuable experience, which they can now pass on to the young people they are working with in their communities.

The next stage of the CONTINUE Project will put the learnings of the Lithuania training into practice. In the case of PVM, Georgia will be working with young people from Gorse Hill Studios in Trafford. They will work with Georgia to develop their own social action project, based on the findings of the Community Reporting sessions and Conversation of Change event that they have been involved with earlier in the project.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what emerges from the next stage of the project, remember to stay tuned for updates!