Listening to our Gypsy, Romany, Boater and Traveller (GRBT) Communities

In November 2025, BSW ICB secured funding to engage with mobile communities across our area as part of the national programme exploring one of the three major shifts underway in the NHS. Recognising that Gypsy, Roma, Boater and Traveller (GRBT) communities form an important part of BSW's unique population, we undertook a focused series of engagement sessions with GRBT community members, alongside local service veterans, to understand their experiences of accessing health services.

We felt it was essential to hear directly from GRBT communities as our neighbourhood health plans evolve, given that their experiences often highlight the very challenges these plans aim to address: the impact of wider determinants of health, barriers to joined-up care and persistent issues around access.

While our broader engagement work with other groups, including older adults, parents and caregivers, routine and manual workers, minority ethnic communities and the wider public through an online survey, remains ongoing, the GRBT engagement phase has concluded. The insights gathered will form an integral part of our overall neighbourhood health engagement findings.

Importantly, our conversations with GRBT community members provided an opportunity for in-depth, one-to-one discussions that extended beyond the immediate scope of neighbourhood health. This enabled us to capture a richer picture of their day-to-day experiences, challenges, and priorities.

Given the depth and specificity of what we heard, we chose to present this work as a standalone report offering a snapshot of GRBT community perspectives on local health and care services. The themes raised include access to care, experiences of discrimination, communication challenges and difficulties with continuity of care.

This report provides valuable insight into the daily realities facing a community in BSW that experiences significant hardship, multiple challenges and ongoing discrimination, and whose voices are too often unheard in traditional engagement processes. Our aim is to ensure those voices are meaningfully reflected in the future design of health services across BSW.

We would like to pass on our thanks to the residents of sites we visited in BaNES, Swindon and Wiltshire and members of the boating community in BaNES and Wiltshire for kindly taking the time to talk to us and providing such a warm welcome. Thank you also to Neighbourhood and housing teams at Bath and North East Somerset Council, Swindon Council and Wiltshire Borough Council for facilitating our visits and to the GRBT team at Julian House for facilitating pre-visit cultural awareness training.

You can read the report here: Engagement Report Health Access and Experiences of Gypsy Boater Traveller and Romany Communities