Like every year Social Prescribing Day was a very busy and exciting day for us at Access Elemental to celebrate all things social prescribing and raise further awareness of its benefits for everybody, regardless of age, gender, or geographic location.
Like last year, we visited many customers to celebrate Social Prescribing Day. We honored some of their biggest achievements over the past year whether it was an increase in referrals and interventions, securing future social prescribing funding, or being able to work with more organisations and health and social care professionals across a community to build a stronger co-production approach, we celebrated every achievement big or small.
It was amazing to see so many of our customers in person on Social Prescribing Day as well as see what more people were doing to celebrate online using the hashtag #SocialPrescribingDay2024.
What was also exciting this year was to find out that not only had we been shortlisted for a National Association Link Worker Award but we had won it too.
Our award was for Social Prescribing Partnership of the Year to celebrate our collaboration with Life Rooms, Mersey. This partnership transformed Life Rooms’ digital transformation journey for the better by becoming the first NHS Trust to use our Access Rio and Access Elemental integration. This, in turn, reduced admin time and appointment time for social-related issues by a staggering 70%.
We cannot wait to accept the award later this year to truly celebrate the impact both digital social prescribing and interoperability of solutions can have on communities to improve mental health and wellbeing on a larger and more sustainable scale.
It was a brilliant day to not just raise awareness of social prescribing in general but also how social prescribing models can be adopted in different sectors. One of the things we wanted to highlight the most was how social prescribing could potentially be a solution to overcome the children’s mental health crisis we are currently facing, to act as a preventative and early intervention solution to bridge the gap between mental health provisions and improve the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people.
Fuel poverty and social prescribing – How can Access Elemental help?
With data from Public Health Wales showing that health conditions arising from poor housing and fuel poverty can cost NHS Wales as much as £95 million every year and cost the NHS across the UK as much as £1 billion, it is essential solutions are put into place to better address the wider social determinants of health to provide more personalised support so individuals no longer have to suffer in silence or make the difficult and unjust decisions of whether to put food on the table or heat their homes.
At Access Elemental Social Prescribing we know and understand the issues fuel poverty can cause for peoples’ mental health. Adopting social prescribing in housing therefore offers a great opportunity for housing associations and health and social care professionals to work together to address the root causes of poverty in particular areas, especially socially deprived areas.
Warm Wales, is a great example of a social prescribing housing customer who works with us. They are on a mission to ensure fuel poverty is combatted across Wales. Through using our digital social prescribing software they have been able to create partnerships with many different organisations, including Newport City Homes, to offer seamless integrations with their systems to establish smoother and safer referral processes that always puts the individual first.
Through using our two-way integrations with 3rd party systems, Warm Wales and Newport City Homes have seen a 93% reduction in anxiety about energy bills and over half a million pounds in cost savings due to the decrease in both GP attendance and emergency care.
It is clear therefore that social prescribing can go beyond primary care, but only when organisations can fully work together seamlessly as this enables the wider determinants of health to always be addressed thoroughly.
Harnessing spring’s energy with social prescribing goal setting – What does Access Elemental want to achieve next?
As many social prescribing services and organisations may be quickly realising, for social prescribing to be a success, strong co-production approaches and multi-disciplinary teams are needed to understand the needs and priorities of each sector and community to fully understand how social prescribing can work, be adopted, and the resources that will be needed.
Without having multi-disciplinary teams that communicate together you have the risk of organisations not taking the impacts and benefits social prescribing can have seriously. That’s why it is important when introducing social prescribing it is explained easily so it doesn’t add to professionals’ already busy workloads, especially health and social care professionals.
One of the ways we are starting to do this is through launching our first deminar series. Here our 30-minute deminars are about showing not telling how digital can support your health and wellbeing programme.
Our first deminar was a huge success towards the end of April, where we explored how to create a marketplace approach that works for your citizens, your team, and your voluntary and community partners. Here we showed how Access Elemental supports your inbuilt directory of services to always keep it up-to-date as well as the other directory integrations we have in place to improve both our community provider portal, and citizen/patient portal.
It was a huge success, and we cannot wait to continue with our series further. To keep up-to-date with the latest information on our next one, so you don’t miss out, join the 3,000 of us on Linkedin and embrace our digital social prescribing community that always looks to improve outcomes.
At Access Elemental we want to make implementing digital social prescribing as easy as possible regardless of what sector you are in so you can use population health approaches with other health and social care professionals so no one goes without the support they need.
For more information on how digital social prescribing can help your primary care settings work with other organisations better to reduce GP attendance and admin time, as well as improve your overall community’s mental health and wellbeing, contact us today.
Let’s start your social prescribing journey now, and who knows we could be visiting you and celebrating your achievements next Social Prescribing Day.
Discover more about The Access Group HSC:
The Access Group’s portfolio of integrated solutions empowers professionals in healthcare, support, and social care services to deliver joined-up quality and preventative care. With over 30 years of experience, they support local authorities alongside small, medium, and large organisations, to focus on the individual with the freedom to make it personal.
