What is Social Prescribing?
Social prescribing is a key component of Universal Personalised Care.
It is an approach that connects people to activities, groups, and services in their community to meet the practical, social and emotional needs that affect their health and wellbeing.
In social prescribing, local agencies such as local charities, social care and health services refer people to a social prescribing link worker. Social prescribing link workers give people time, focusing on ‘what matters to me?’ to co-produce a simple personalised care and support plan, and support people to take control of their health and wellbeing.
Social prescribing link workers also support existing community groups to be accessible and sustainable, and help people to start new groups, working collaboratively with all local partners.
Social prescribing is an all-age, whole population approach that works particularly well for people who:
· have one or more long term conditions
· who need support with low level mental health issues
· who are lonely or isolated
· who have complex social needs which affect their wellbeing
Social prescribing gives people the opportunity to be listened to in a world where the NHS and its services are pushed to the very limit. Social prescribers are there to listen and to link patients into the local community and the provision that exists within it. Their role is to listen and link without judgement to take a holistic community whole person based approach to the issues/concerns of the individual in front of them.
We work within the Primary Care Network and as a team we connect with the VCFSE sector provision within the local community to provide our social prescriptions. As an organisation we are uniquely placed as the third sector infrastructure body to support the provisions in which we are referring to. We ensure that any referral that we make is supported by investment in our local community and work hard to provide robust support whilst building capacity and resilience. This ensures that we will always have organisations that we can refer to and our community connections ensure that we are able to respond and react to the needs of the patients and our VCFSE sector.
Social Prescribing is about supporting the clinicians and specialists to do what they are trained to do, and we can pick up the rest of the wellbeing issues and channel that person to the correct local support in a holistic approach to health, the aim of the role is to take the pressure off NHS and in the longer term adult social care.
We receive our referrals from GP surgeries, and we will work closely with the clinical team. If you would like to find out more about social prescribing services, please contact your GP for a referral.