In May we held a social prescribing networking event for professionals in the health and care and voluntary sectors, who wanted to know more about social prescribing and hear from others who are delivering or thinking of delivering initiatives.

NHS England In January, NHS England announced plans to recruit 1,000 social prescribing link workers as part of the NHS Long Term Plan objectives. There are currently a number of existing social prescribing initiatives, but this recruitment drive would create a new level of consistency across areas.

As social prescribing is at the forefront of conversations in health and care, we used this opportunity to bring together partners to share ideas and best practice in this area and to start a dialogue on social prescribing within the East Midlands.

The event saw over 130 delegates come together from across the East Midlands from councils, CCGs, STPs, GP practices, charities, to patient representatives.

There were a number of engaging presentations from a mixture of organisations. You can also access the presentations below:

Experiences of social prescribing – Bassetlaw CVS

Catherine Burn, Director and Julie Barnes, Social Prescribing Manager gave a detailed overview of Bassetlaw CVS’ pilot social prescribing model and how it functions in their area.

Community Connection – Erewash CVS

Stella Scott, Chief Executive Officer, Jo Hallam, Development Worker and Dr Duncan Gooch, the Golden Brook Practice talked about their community schemes and not using the term social prescribing but instead considering the concept of community capital.

Social Prescribing Scoping Tool – University of Leicester

Dr Ceri Jones from the University of Leicester spoke about the potential development of a social prescribing scoping tool in conjunction with EMAHSN to highlight ‘who is doing what and where’ in social prescribing.

Action for Gipton Elderly – Leeds City Council

Karen Woloszczak, AGE Manager at Action for Gipton Elderly and Michelle Atkinson, Commissioning Programme Manager talked about their approach to social prescribing and empowering the public to set up community groups and activities as a sustainable and cost effective way to deliver social prescribing successfully.

RECAP Health – Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust

Jenny Newman, Digital Health Manager and Charlotte Woods, Quality Improvement Lead from Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust spoke about RECAP Health their online repository of signposting and information resources to facilitate social prescribing.

Themes

A number of questions and themes were obvious on the day:

• Delegates were very interested and excited by the possibilities of social prescribing initiatives and the potential to improve health and wellbeing
• Funding sources for link workers and the provision of schemes was an area of discussion and consideration
• How the referral process could/should potentially work
• Ensuring that the voluntary sector are prepared for any possible influx that the streamlining of social prescribing could cause

Next steps

We will now work in consultation with the University of Leicester and the local health and care system to finalise the development of a social prescribing scoping tool. This tool will provide the EMAHSN with an oversight of the social prescribing services that are in place across the region, and we will use this data to shape our future work in this area. The scoping tool will also be made available to health and care organisations to enable benchmarking.

If you’re interested in joining any future social prescribing networking events or hearing more about social prescribing scoping and medicines optimisation, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Author 

Kate Dawson - Regional Consultant Pharmacist