By Meg Jorsh

Last updated at 13:41, Tuesday, 01 December 2009

Cumbria Primary Care Trust staff should have mandatory training on gypsy and traveller culture, a report has found.

Specialist health workers should also be appointed to visit campsites, according the report by NHS Cumbria. Research found that travellers were more than eight times as likely to have family members with untreated illness or depression than the general population.

The project recommended the introduction of hand-held medical notes, to help the 40 per cent of travellers who’d had treatment cut short when they moved to a new site.

Ian Twiselton, who prepared the report with Fiona Huntington, said that while 86 per cent were registered with a GP, more than half had not disclosed their background.

He added: “There’s a very real fear, rightly or wrongly, that they will suffer from an adverse or hostile reaction if they identify themselves as travellers.”

Targeted vaccination programmes, based at campsites, would boost the number of traveller children who were fully immunised – just 42 per cent, compared to 91 cent across Cumbria as a whole.

But the report also found that more than half of travellers were living in houses or flats, rather than caravans.

The information was gathered from 103 people around the county, interviewed by travellers Louise Wannop and Richard O’Neill.

Louise said: “There’s a lot of travellers about that people aren’t aware of, like myself and my family.

“We started buying houses a long time ago, because we thought it would mean a better life.”

They may find it easier to register with a GP, but gypsy house-owners are still affected by centuries of culture.

Richard, a health improvement specialist, said: “I’m from a large travelling family up in the North East and I got involved with health improvement because of my dad, who died of a heart attack when he was 58. We never really talked about health and I wanted to stop any other families from going through what we did.”

Of Cumbrian travellers who were camping, 78 per cent lived on authorised land while 22 per cent used unauthorised sites.

First published at 11:22, Tuesday, 01 December 2009
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk