Survey of social prescribing projects and other social and wellbeing approaches to health in the North West Coast

Problem

Social prescribing, the process of linking people to wellbeing or social activities are a way of helping people to change social and psychological factors that may be having a negative effect on their health. There has recently been a rapid expansion of social prescribing link workers in primary care (though not an associated expansion of social/wellbeing activities), in the absence of clear evidence of what works to make social prescribing programmes effective and sustainable, or how they should be evaluated. This presents both a need and an opportunity to learn from what is already happening in social prescribing, and to identify important gaps in knowledge where further research is needed. The social prescribing team at Liverpool consulted with members of the Applied Research Collaborative North West Coast (ARC-NWC) - a consortium of health and social organisations and individuals that research and apply interventions and evaluations to improve health inequalities (https://arc-nwc.nihr.ac.uk). They highlighted the need to conduct a survey to ascertain the research, evaluation and implementation needs of social prescribing programmes across the North West Coast. Findings from this survey will inform a strategy to develop a programme of social prescribing research and associated funding bids for ARC-NWC.

Approach

The survey will be conducted in three stages. The first survey conducted between February and March 2020 will provide a baseline of social prescribing and wellbeing/social activities across the NWC. Two further surveys will be conducted midway and at the end of ARC NWC in September 2024 to show progression and impact of social prescribing activities over time. The survey will be conducted electronically, using Google Forms.The baseline survey link has been sent to 61 ARC NWC partners, to Public Advisors, academic staff, and people who attended the ARC launch event. Participants have been asked to snowball the questionnaire to other organisations or programmes they know. The questionnaire includes questions about project components (including questions related to their target population and addressing health inequalities), referral pathways (including whether there is a link worker and if so their roles), community participation, and evaluation. It also asks about the challenges faced in implementing and evaluating their SP projects.We will analyse the findings using simple descriptive statistics.

Findings

We will present the findings from the baseline survey at the SAPC conference.

Consequences

The survey is one of three ARC action research initiatives (which also include an ARC knowledge exchange event for social prescribing in April 2020, and a community/ public advisor survey conducted by a team in Blackpool). These will inform the creation of co-produced research proposals and partnership collaborations which will be taken forward and developed as several grant(s) to apply for external competitive funding.