Vibrant Health Advocates – North Star is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation based in Greenock, serving newly arrived migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and people with limited English across the Inverclyde area. We were founded by health and community workers who had watched too many people fall through the cracks of a system that is, in principle, universal — but in practice, depends on people already knowing how to navigate it.
Our work centres on the health navigator relationship. A navigator is not a doctor or a social worker. They are a trained guide, often someone who has themselves experienced arriving in a new country and learning a new health system. They accompany people to appointments, explain discharge letters, help families understand what a referral means and what to expect. They are patient, consistent, and fluent in the unwritten rules that most long-term residents take for granted.
We work closely with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Inverclyde HSCP, local GP practices, and the third sector organisations across Renfrewshire and Inverclyde that form the daily fabric of support for arriving communities. Our data shows that early, supported contact with primary care significantly reduces emergency presentations and improves long-term health outcomes — but beyond the statistics, our work is about dignity. It is about ensuring that the first time someone interacts with healthcare in their new home, they feel seen, heard, and helped.
Greenock, Inverclyde
We are not a medical service.
We are the human bridge that
makes medical services reachable.
North Star grew from a gap that frontline workers in Greenock had identified for years: people arriving through the asylum dispersal system, or coming to join family, or seeking work, were registering with services weeks or months late — sometimes never. Language was the most visible barrier, but it ran deeper than translation. Many new arrivals came from countries where health systems worked entirely differently, where you paid at the door, where mental health was not discussed, where bringing a man to a female GP appointment was the only way a woman felt safe.
A small group of community health workers, interpreters, and people with lived experience of migration began meeting informally in 2017 to share referrals, pool resources, and accompany people to appointments. By 2019, the demand was undeniable and the model was working. Vibrant Health Advocates – North Star became a formal SCIO in 2020, grounding the work in governance and accountability while keeping the human warmth that had always been its engine.
Community workshops, 2019
Growing our team
North Star today
Vibrant Health Advocates – North Star exists to ensure that no person settling in Inverclyde is prevented from accessing the healthcare and wellbeing support they need because of language, unfamiliarity with UK systems, or lack of trusted guidance. We do this through direct multilingual health navigation, community outreach, and close partnership with the NHS and local services — combining professional rigour with the lived understanding that only comes from walking the same road. We believe that health equity is not an aspiration but an obligation, and that in a port town with centuries of arrivals, Greenock has both the tradition and the responsibility to make every new neighbour feel at home in their own health.
Vibrant Health Advocates – North Star is governed by a board of trustees who bring together expertise in health policy, community development, legal advice, and lived experience of migration. They provide strategic oversight and hold the organisation to its values, while our staff and volunteer navigators carry the work into the community every day. We are proud that several of our trustees and navigators first came to us as service users — that continuity of experience is one of our greatest strengths.
Catriona MacPhail
Chair
Yusuf Al-Rashidi
Treasurer
Priya Nair-Henderson
Trustee
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