What is community engagement?
Community engagement is a broad concept that involves actively involving individuals and groups in the decision-making processes, activities, and initiatives that affect their community. It’s about fostering meaningful interactions, collaborations, and partnerships between people and organisations to address shared concerns, improve the quality of life, and build a sense of belonging and ownership through strong co-production approaches.
In the context of social prescribing, community engagement involves actively involving individuals, groups, and organisations in creating and utilising resources that support wellbeing outside of traditional medical treatments.
Community engagement in social prescribing therefore means actively involving local resources and stakeholders to create a supportive environment that enhances individuals’ health and wellbeing through access to holistic, community-based support.
Why is community engagement in social prescribing important?
Community engagement in social prescribing is crucial for many reasons. Ultimately it helps increase the awareness of the holistic approach which in turn increases the number of organisations getting involved to refer a patient and encourages more participation from patients to benefit from non-clinical support to improve their mental health and wellbeing.
Below are some more reasons why community engagement is vital for effective social prescribing.
1. Provides better-tailored solutions
Community engagement in social prescribing ensures the services are tailored to the specific needs and preferences of the local population to encourage patients’ attendance.
Involving community members in the planning and implementation of these services can also help address the unique health and wellbeing challenges faced by different groups to make interventions more relevant and effective.
2. Increased Trust and Acceptance
When community members and organisations are actively involved in social prescribing, especially within the VCSE sector, it builds both trust and acceptance. As a result, people are more likely to engage and benefit from services that have been created and shaped by their input as it instills confidence the service will best match their needs.
This, in turn, continues to build trust leading to higher participation rates and more successful outcomes.
3. Better resource allocation
One of the biggest challenges of successful social prescribing is funding. Not being able to secure future funding puts your services' resource allocation at risk. In a recent social prescribing survey, 50% of our customers said securing future funding was their biggest social prescribing concern.
By understanding what services, groups, and activities are already available within the community, social prescribing can build on these resources to avoid duplication, maximising efficiency and the impacts of interventions.
4. Improved Empowerment and Ownership
Engaging the community in social prescribing helps to empower individuals and groups to take ownership of their health and wellbeing.
As a result, this sense of ownership can motivate people to actively participate in and sustain the changes recommended through social prescribing, leading to more lasting improvements.
5. Improves coordination and integration
Ultimately one of the biggest benefits of engaging the community with social prescribing is that it encourages collaborations between healthcare providers, social services, community groups, and housing associations to create a more cohesive support network to address a wider range of needs more effectively. This, in turn, helps create both stronger multidisciplinary teams and integrated neighbourhood teams where all members work towards the same goal of improving the mental health and wellbeing of the community.
6. Better addresses the social determinants of health
Community engagement helps address social determinants of health and reduces avoidable health inequalities by incorporating local insights into the design and delivery of services. This approach helps tackle broader issues such as social isolation, housing, and employment, which significantly impact overall health and wellbeing.
7. Builds resilience and social capital
Engaging the community in social prescribing builds social capital and resilience by strengthening networks and relationships within the community. This can enhance collective wellbeing and create a more supportive environment for individuals seeking to improve their health.
Overall, ensuring there is community engagement in your social prescribing service is vital to ensure that services are more relevant, effective, and sustainable to lead to better health outcomes and a more cohesive community support system that caters to every need.
Increasing community engagement – What are the challenges?
Increasing community engagement in social prescribing offers several challenges, with the biggest being coping with the lack of awareness. Many community members may not be aware of social prescribing and its benefits. Because of this, raising awareness to increase community involvement and educating the public about how social prescribing works can be challenging.
This challenge is then exacerbated further when there are populations with low health literacy or limited access to information, meaning they are less likely to not only understand the service but also have access to it.
As well as the lack of awareness of social prescribing in some communities, there are also other challenges to be aware of including:
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Being able to design social prescribing programs that cater to a wide range of cultural, social, and economic backgrounds
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Ensuring services are inclusive and accessible to all local demographics including more vulnerable and underserved populations
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Managing the limited resources and funding
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Overcoming resistance and building trust in social prescribing
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Enabling effective coordination and communication among stakeholders
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Tailoring communication strategies and materials for different cultural contexts including different language support so its accessible to all
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Building trust and relationships
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Sustaining engagement
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Integrating with existing services seamlessly
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Being able to record accurate measurements of engagement levels, effectiveness, and outcomes to identify areas of improvement
Ways to increase community engagement in social prescribing
Once the challenges of engaging communities in social prescribing are addressed it is easier to determine strategies to improve, increase, and maintain community engagement.
Having a variety of strategies is key to ensuring your social prescribing program is more inclusive, accessible, and effective in meeting the needs of the community. Below are our top 12 tips on ways to increase community engagement in social prescribing:
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Build stronger partnerships
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Engage healthcare providers who can advocate for social prescribing
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Understand community needs
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Personalise outreach to be accessible to your target populations
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Promote the benefits of social prescribing through local media, community events, and social media
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Use multiple communication channels to engage wider audiences across all demographics
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Ensure accessibility for all
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Develop volunteer programs to empower residents to become social prescribing ambassadors
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Include community members in the planning and decision-making
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Constantly gain feedback to identify areas of improvement to maintain engagement
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Provide support to help residents engage in social prescribing activities like providing transport to and from the activities
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Always track engagement and attendance to assess the effectiveness of social prescribing
Best ways to increase community engagement in social prescribing
As discussed, there are lots of ways to both increase and maintain community engagement in social prescribing. However, it’s important to note that different methods will need to be used depending on your target population.
For example, for a population group with a lower digital literacy, promoting the benefits of social prescribing online wouldn’t benefit them. However, encouraging residents in this target population to become social prescribing ambassadors and share their experiences with others may be more popular. Providing support to help these residents get to and from social prescribing activities would equally be as beneficial.
What is always needed, however, regardless of the strategies used to boost engagement, is a way to measure and track the effectiveness of both social prescribing itself and the methods used to increase and maintain engagement.
Investing in digital social prescribing significantly enhances community engagement by leveraging technology to address several key challenges and opportunities.
At Access Elemental Social Prescribing, we understand the proven effectiveness of social prescribing and the critical importance of being easily able to track and measure its impacts on communities. Our social prescribing platform provides straightforward and efficient tools to gather evidence for social prescribing, helping to boost engagement, unlock future funding opportunities, and ultimately support the growth and expansion of your programs.
Our latest work with the University of City London (UCL) used our anonymised data from our platform to analyse the state of social prescribing across the UK. They concluded that 90% of referrals have initial contact with a link worker, however only 38% led to an intervention being received. These figures demonstrate that people are aware of social prescribing due to their initial contact with the program, however, engagement isn’t sustained leading to nearly two-thirds of individuals not engaging in interventions or support groups.
We believe one way to overcome this challenge to ensure community engagement with both leaders of groups and individuals themselves is through having a populated directory of services that is updated and maintained in real-time. That way individuals have confidence that they will only ever be referred to up-to-date activities and interventions, and as popularity grows more activity groups will want to get involved to help improve their overall community’s health and wellbeing.
We know a social prescribing programme is only as good as the services that are on offer. With Marketplace, we work with our customers to build a directory of services that is relevant to the programme and will continue to maintain it for you. Here our platform itself allows users to make self-referrals and enable VCSEs to list their services, reducing the admin strain on social prescribing teams. As a result, you can create a social prescribing programme that is much more connected within your primary care settings and the wider community, making it more accessible to individuals across all demographics.
By seamlessly integrating with our CMS, tracking the effectiveness of social prescribing has never been easier. Here you can easily track every step of an individual’s social prescribing journey identifying when a journey is and isn’t working well so adjustments to their social prescription can be made to maintain engagement by concentrating on what matters to them.
A key challenge when a social prescribing programme grows across the community engaging is being able to manage the different referrals coming from different stakeholders and referral routes. With our social prescribing platform, managing referrals couldn’t be any easier through seamlessly integrating with leading clinical, mental health, and social care case management systems as well as third parties, so a referral can be made in a matter of few clicks all within their system. As a result, they have full visibility of the social prescribing journeys so they can see in real-time the benefits of it to maintain engagement and allow your social prescribing programme to continue to grow sustainably with the whole community involved.
Summarising the key roles of community engagement in social prescribing
This article has shown how community engagement is the cornerstone of effective social prescribing. By actively involving local resources and stakeholders, social prescribing can address the social determinants of health more proactively to reduce avoidable health inequalities and disparities, build stronger communities, and improve outcomes.
By explaining the benefits of having good community engagement, this article has addressed the challenges that can arise in increasing and sustaining it. We have explained that to overcome these challenges you need a well-connected network, consistent tracking, and ongoing support to adapt as social prescribing needs change.
At Access Elemental Social Prescribing, we’re dedicated to helping you achieve these goals. Marketplace offers a comprehensive solution to build, maintain, and enhance your social prescribing program by providing a fully configurable website to host your updated directory of services in real time.
Our easy-to-use solution makes it simple for the VCSE sector to get involved and upload their activities on the directory as well as keep GPs and other professionals engaged in social prescribing to build a stronger multi-disciplinary team all working together to make social prescribing more widespread and sustainable, both now and in the future.
Request a demo today and we can show you first-hand how Marketplace can boost your community engagement today.
Contact us now and let’s start your social prescribing journey transforming your service for the better today.
