In this piece the audience will read about our new integration that has gone live making it easier for clinicians to manage and send referrals to social prescribing services. We explain how our social prescribing platform integrates with Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust’s EPR system to achieve this. We also inform the audience of the content we have published this month to educate readers on how the wider social determinants of health impact our health and wellbeing and how social prescribing helps, what the keyworkers of social prescribing do and why they are important, and how we celebrate their hard work on social prescribing day.
Making the clinical world and social prescribing world work together as one
How did we integrate clinical systems and social prescribing systems together?
This month has been very exciting as we have been able to announce the integration of Access Rio EPR (Electronic Patient Record system) with our Access Elemental social prescribing platform and our first customer to use the integration.
Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust have been using Access Rio EPR system since 2015 and Access Elemental Social Prescribing since 2016. They had been wanting this integration to happen for some time, and this integration enables around 700 mental health professionals across Merseyside to refer patients to social prescribing services, provided by The Life Rooms, directly through their EPR system to our Access Elemental platform.
The aim of the integration was to reassure clinicians that they are referring patients to safe and appropriate services. Through this integration clinicians can track what services people have accessed and monitor the impact they have had within the EPR all in one place.
Clinicians will now be empowered to spot social problems that are often the main cause for deteriorations in mental health conditions by having full sight of their patients’ care journeys. It is expected to free up clinical time by approximately 20%.
“This could be an absolute game changer for clinical teams and services. As a clinician, if you are identifying social needs in a vulnerable individual, you will be able to refer them easily and have full line of sight. It will help clinicians do their job whilst being able to monitor and see the impact of everything in the EPR.”
Gary Thorpe, Service Lead and Head of Integration at The Life Rooms
We have been so excited to announce this news and see the launch of it this month and we cannot wait to see how well it improve outcomes for patients across Merseyside.
Telling the world about social prescribing
This month we have been busy spreading the news on the impact social prescribing can have on you, your family, and your community.
One of our main focuses this month has been to educate us all on what the wider social determinants on health are, and why social prescribing is important to overcome them.
The World Health Organisation has identified that social issues may be more crucial than we thought when it comes to our health outcomes. In fact, they state they account for 30-55% of our health outcomes showing how the impacts of wider social determinants of health can be detrimental to individuals’ health and wellbeing.
Some examples of wider social determinants of health include education, housing, economic stability, healthcare access, and social communities. We have been informing people how each of these can take a toll on your mental health and wellbeing and how social prescribing can help.
This month we have also been interested in promoting the roles and responsibilities of support workers in making social prescribing happen, particularly community navigators.
Community navigators work hard to support patients suffering with complex depression and anxiety to help rebuild their relationships with loved ones and their community. We have been sharing information on the important work community navigators do, as well as tips for best practice including knowing what services and interventions your local area has to offer and acknowledging that every patient’s journey will be different.
Community Navigators are just one example of a keyworker that help to make social prescribing happen, and Social Prescribing Day is one way that we nationally celebrate this. Social Prescribing Day is an opportunity to spread awareness of what social prescribing is, what it can do, and who is involved. Normally it takes place during the second week of March each year and gets more and more popular from one year to the next. The first Social Prescribing Day was so popular that over 29 million people interacted with the #socialprescribingday hashtag across 11 different countries.
For us at Access Elemental Social Prescribing this month has been all about educating individuals and the wider public on the impacts social prescribing can have on someone’s mental health and wellbeing and how we can celebrate the hard work of those involved. We have also continued to concentrate on streamlining processes and the management of referrals for the social prescribing services we work with, by finding new and innovative ways to make the running of a service even easier, whilst forming new partnerships too.
Discover more about The Access Group
Access Elemental Social Prescribing improves lives of individuals, families, and their carers by providing the capability to design, implement, measure and report on effective models and approaches to social prescribing. We help build confidence that your social prescribing network is connected within the communities your social prescribing service supports.
