As the vibrant days of summer come to a close, we’re excited to share with you all our hard work on making sure all systems can connect together to improve the overall mental health and wellbeing of your community.
How can social prescribing create social value?
Like we have discussed previously, our mission is to demonstrate how social prescribing can go further than just primary care networks. It is a co-production approach which allows professionals from all sectors to help improve the wellbeing and mental health of a community.
Last month was no different. We had an amazing webinar looking at how social value can be created through social prescribing in the housing sector. Here we were joined with Apex Housing Association where they explained their vision for every person to enjoy great quality homes and support in vibrant and caring communities.
They explained how they have been working with us to have a track record of leading the way in building sustainable communities through the delivery of quality, affordable homes including tailored support and care services. It was a great interactive webinar explaining the benefits of social prescribing in housing. Watch our webinar recording today.
Why is it important for systems to connect across the community in social prescribing?
Connecting social systems across the community in social prescribing is crucial for several reasons.
Firstly, it enables a holistic and comprehensive approach to addressing individuals’ wellbeing. By linking healthcare, social services, educational institutions, local organisations and more, a better understanding of an individual’s needs and circumstances can be achieved. Interventions and support services which matter to the individual can be arranged to reduce the duplication of efforts across different services and organisations, to ensure individuals receive timely and tailored support.
It also encourages community-wide collaborations to foster a sense of unity and shared responsibility for wellbeing. For example, when various stakeholders work together they can create a more supportive environment for everyone. This is even more effective when tackling complex needs which need multidimensional support.
Therefore through connecting systems across the community in social prescribing not only can this improve the overall mental health and wellbeing of individuals it also creates a stronger, more resilient, and interconnected community as a whole.
As social prescribing is growing bigger and bigger each year it is getting more complex connecting systems together to all data to integrate and avoid duplications. It’s crucial to allow systems to integrate together to manage social prescribing referrals more effectively.
Currently at the minute there are no set standards in how this should happen. But by the end of this month the PRSB’s social prescribing standards will be launched. This will improve the lack of consistency there currently is for Link Workers to record social prescribing data, and ensure that social prescribing services no longer have to rely on paper, manual processes or spreadsheets to record all their individual social prescribing journeys more effectively.
What are the PRSB Social Prescribing Standards?
Over the last two years multiple stakeholders, including us at Access Elemental Social Prescribing have been working together to create the new social prescribing standards. These standards will be crucial in demonstrating the link between social prescribing and population health management and why it is important when addressing the wider determinants of health to go beyond more traditional interventions.
These standards therefore help to prevent risks of individuals being left with their needs unmet as well as provide better ways to record and measure social prescribing digitally to share progress with healthcare professionals and end-users.
The standards will be split into three scenarios:
- Social Prescribing Information Standard
- Referral to social prescribing services
- Message back to GP and referrer
Within each part there will be standards which will be mandatory, required and optional and these will then be split into a further two parts.
- Information Standard
- Minimum Dataset
Being involved in the development of these standards in the last two years has been really exciting. As a digital social prescribing software we have been able to work with other stakeholders on the best ways social prescribing can continue to grow and how data can be handled more efficiently.
Since working with the PRSB for the initial pilots we have also decided to join their PRSB Standards Partnership. Here we will be able to continue to work with the PRSB to ensure our systems can connect with other systems across the community to ensure social prescribing is more effective and have better ways to record the evidence for social prescribing.
Joining the partnership also offers us some great benefits including regular updates on national policy briefings, access to bi-annual roadmap events so we know what is in store, and support from their experts to help and guide us to improve our software further as well help us to prepare for the conformance assessment.
Find our more about the PRSB social prescribing standards today and how we can help your social prescribing service be better prepared for the standards launching at the end of this month.
How are Access Elemental sharing the importance of social prescribing?
As well as joining partnership with the PRSB, we are also showcasing the importance of social prescribing and how it can improve health outcomes in a number of different ways.
One of the main ways we are doing this, this autumn is through speaking at the Why Sports Conference on the 12th September. At the conference we will be holding a presentation about harnessing active partnerships to deliver social prescribing and improve health outcomes.
In our presentation we will be explaining what social prescribing is and how it works across multiple sectors, the importance of having a co-production approach and working with local partners, as well as demonstrating a real life example from one of our customers Active Tameside, to demonstrate the impact of prescribing individuals to leisure, sports and green spaces through looking at their data.
For more information book your place at the Why Sports Conference today and we cannot wait to see you there.
This autumn we are also hosting a webinar where we will be discussing how scaling social prescribing across your ICS can halt avoidable health inequalities. Here we will be discussing how you can implement your ICS Social Prescribing plan in line with the new minimum data standards. For more information on our autumn webinar contact us today.
Clearly the end of summer has been a very busy month for us at Access Elemental Social Prescribing. We have been doing a number of different things to ensure we work to connect all systems across the community to improve your local area’s overall health and wellbeing. Whether it’s joining partnerships with the PRSB, attending conferences to share the message social prescribing really does work across a variety of sectors, or hosting our own webinars to explain our aims and visions further, we are busy doing lots this autumn to help your social prescribing service improve your outcomes further.
For more information on our social prescribing software contact us today. Follow us on LinkedIn where you will be able to see all our activities throughout September live and see how we are working hard to spread the importance of being able to manage social prescribing better, so we can have more consistency across data, and most importantly help you grow more and more each year without any issues.
Discover more about The Access Group
Access Elemental Social Prescribing is a digital social prescribing platform which enables GPs and other frontline healthcare professionals, to refer patients/citizens to a Social Prescribing Link Worker, Care Coordinator and/or a Health Coach, so that people with social, emotional, or practical needs are empowered to engage in local programmes and services which improve their health and wellbeing, often using services provided by the voluntary and community sector.
