Helen Macmillan

• Current job title: Personalised Care Lead
• Current employer: General Practice Alliance
• Industry sector: Primary Care

Briefly describe your organisation and its role

General Practice Alliance (GPA) is a GP federation representing 23 member practices across the Borough of Northampton. It delivers services at scale on behalf of its practices, supporting both workforce development and improved access to care. Key services include Enhanced Access (evening and weekend appointments), medical student placements, and a range of personalised care initiatives. These programmes are designed to support population health management, prevention, and the reduction of health inequalities.

What was the project/intervention you were working on?

A population health initiative aimed at increasing awareness and engagement with cancer screening among underserved communities across Northamptonshire. Delivered by GPA in partnership with community organisations and supported by the University of Northampton, the project focused on reducing health inequalities through culturally tailored outreach, education, and co-designed interventions.

Using a community-led approach, it involved engagement events, multilingual resources, and collaboration with trusted local groups to improve knowledge, confidence, and motivation to access screening services. Alongside delivery, a structured evaluation was embedded to assess both process and impact, generating evidence to inform future practice and system-wide improvements.

What were you hoping to achieve?

To increase engagement in cancer screening among underserved communities by addressing health inequalities through community led approaches, education, and partnership working. Our core focus was to improve awareness, knowledge, confidence, and motivation to participate in screening programmes, while also reducing cultural, practical, and systemic barriers to access.

In addition, the project sought to build stronger collaboration across the health system, empower communities through co-design, and generate robust evaluation evidence to inform future practice, sustainability, and wider system change.

What support did you receive from the University team?

• Mentoring
• Evaluation design
• Data collection (strategies)

What was it like working with the University team?

It was a highly positive and supportive experience. The team’s approach was collaborative and flexible, providing mentoring, guidance, and training that built both confidence and capability within our team. They were approachable and responsive, taking the time to understand the practical realities of delivering a community-based project and tailoring their support accordingly.

The team brought strong expertise in evaluation design and methods, helping us to co-develop tools, adopt a mixed methods approach, and strengthen the overall quality of our evidence. It also provided ongoing supervision and acted as a valuable sounding board throughout the evaluation and report writing process. Importantly, the team’s approach focused on building our internal capacity rather than simply delivering outputs, leaving us with a legacy of skills, knowledge, and an ability to undertake robust evaluation in future projects.

What difference did this support make to your project?

It significantly strengthened the quality and robustness of our evaluation. Through mentoring and training, our team developed increased confidence and capability in designing and delivering a mixed methods evaluation approach.

This enabled us to:

• implement structured data collection methods (surveys, focus groups, reflective logs)
• gather both quantitative and qualitative insights into community engagement and outcomes
• produce a comprehensive evaluation report aligned with NHS England requirements
• improve reflective practice and learning throughout the project lifecycle.

Overall, the support improved both the credibility of our findings and our ability to evidence impact.

Can you share any specific outcomes or results?

The project achieved some measurable outcomes:

• 2,851 people reached across 79 engagement events
• 30 community groups engaged across Northampton and Wellingborough
• 362 attitude surveys completed
• 533 meaningful discussions with community members
• 235 documented instances where individuals expressed intent to complete screening.

In addition:

• 80% awareness of screening reported, with 90% willing to attend if invited
• Multilingual, culturally tailored engagement improved accessibility and trust
• Strong multi-agency collaboration strengthened system learning and future planning

These outcomes demonstrate increased awareness, confidence, and readiness to engage with cancer screening.

Did the support influence your organisation beyond this project?

Yes, it has had a lasting impact on our organisation:

• built internal evaluation skills and confidence among staff
• introduced structured evaluation frameworks that can be applied to future projects
• strengthened a culture of evidence-based practice and reflective learning
• improved our ability to design projects with embedded evaluation from the outset.

The partnership has also influenced how we approach future programmes, ensuring that measurement of impact and learning is integral rather than an add-on.

Reflecting on this project, one of the most significant areas of learning has been the importance of combining community-led approaches with robust evaluation methods to truly understand impact. Working with the University of Northampton has strengthened both my own confidence and the wider team’s capability in evaluation, enabling us to move beyond anecdotal feedback to a more structured and evidence-based understanding of our work.

A key insight has been that meaningful engagement is built on trust, cultural understanding, and relationships rather than formal processes. The project reaffirmed that informal, conversational approaches within trusted community settings are far more effective than traditional methods when addressing sensitive topics such as cancer screening. However, these approaches also present challenges for evaluation, requiring flexibility and creativity in how we capture meaningful data.

The experience has also highlighted the complexity of behaviour change. While we saw strong indicators of increased awareness, confidence, and intention to attend screening, systemic barriers, such as access to primary care, poverty, and cultural stigma, continue to limit outcomes. This reinforced the understanding that short-term interventions alone are insufficient and that sustainable, system-wide approaches are essential.

Importantly, this project has strengthened my appreciation of co-design and partnership working. Although achieving true co-production can be challenging within time-limited projects, the value of working alongside communities and trusted organisations has been evident in both the reach and quality of engagement achieved.

Overall, this experience has influenced how I will approach future work – ensuring that evaluation is embedded from the outset, that community voices remain central, and that efforts are focused not only on raising awareness, but on addressing the wider system barriers that shape health inequalities.

The project has benefited multiple groups:

• underserved communities – increased awareness, confidence, and engagement with cancer screening
• community organisations (VCSE sector) – strengthened partnerships, resources, and capacity to deliver health messages
• primary care and system partners – improved understanding of barriers, engagement strategies, and health inequalities
• project staff and GPA organisation – enhanced evaluation capability and skills.

Ultimately, the work contributes to improved equity of access to cancer screening and early diagnosis.

What would you say to other organisations considering working with us?

We would highly recommend working with the University of Northampton. The team are knowledgeable, approachable, and supportive, providing practical guidance tailored to real-world service delivery. Their mentoring approach builds confidence and capability within teams, rather than simply delivering outputs. This ensures organisations gain sustainable skills alongside high quality evaluation support.

The partnership added significant value to our project and has left a legacy in how we approach evaluation and service improvement in the future.