What is social prescribing day?
Social prescribing day is an annual celebration of social prescribing to celebrate and recognise the hard work and involvement of both Social Prescribing professionals including Social Prescribing Link Workers and local community organsiations.
Why is social prescribing day important?
National Social prescribing day is important as it has become a keyway to promote what social prescribing is to the wider public and to sectors beyond healthcare, where social prescribing has been predominantly based.
One of the main ways the day is promoted is through social media, particularly twitter, through the hashtag #socialprescribingday. The first social prescribing day was so successful that 29.5 million people interacted with the hashtag and 11 countries were involved. The hashtag itself was trending #3rd in the UK.
Year after year the day has become more successful with different social prescribing services and programmes getting involved. A wide range of different webinars and activities are hosted to help promote what social prescribing is and the benefits it has on individuals and communities.
It also offers individuals who have used social prescribing services the platform to express their social prescribing journeys including how it has helped them, if they experienced any challenges, and if they did how did they overcome them.
This year sees the 6th annual Social Prescribing Day. Usually, it takes place in the first few weeks of March during social prescribing week and month. Like social prescribing day, social prescribing week allows a whole week to celebrate the successes and promote social prescribing, with the actual social prescribing day falling towards the end of the week.
The growth of social prescribing
Social prescribing offers a non-clinical way to improve individuals' health and wellbeing. It is not seen as a new concept, but NHS services issuing national outs of social prescribing in their new Long-Term Plan has increased the demand dramatically.
Over the past ten years key personnel in Primary Care became the driving force to ensure people understood how social prescribing was positively impacting the mental health and wellbeing of individuals, as well as reducing the demand on the NHS. These key personnel include Marie Anne Essam, Jessica Hollingsworth, Sam Everington, Mohan Sekeram and Ollie Hart.
Since 2019 and the NHS announcing its plans to upscale social prescribing, the social prescribing care model has been adapted for a variety of sectors including: Local Authorities, education and some in-prison settings. This adaptation enables families, students, and people in prison to have a say on their health and wellbeing and how they access and engage in services and interventions within their community.
What are the challenges of delivering social prescribing?
Like any service or organization as the demand increases it is almost virtually impossible to not experience any pitfalls or challenges in the roll-out process. Some of the most common pitfalls include:
1. Time management for Social Prescribing Link Workers
Currently Social Prescribing Link Workers are juggling multiple duties and responsibilities with a limited amount of time. Whilst demonstrating the uptake of social prescribing around a 1/3 if not more of their time is spent forming and maintaining partners and presenting outcomes of social prescribing to different agencies.
Some social prescribing cases are more complex than others and require more time to help the individuals. This extra time spent with individuals is not always fully recognized or valued by commissioners causing the expectation of more administrative workloads to still be completed despite the more complex cases.
So, Social Prescribing Link Workers need more access to escalate pathways in more complex cases to ensure all support or social workers involved have the right level of training, and commissioners are aware of the full picture of individuals Link Workers are working with.
2. Managing referrals from different sources
In general GP referrals are normally one of the main referral routes into social prescribing, but more recently referrals are also being made by social workers, college tutors, hospital discharge teams and Job Centre staff.
One of the customers we work with at Access Elemental Social Prescribing have 86 different referral sources to their social prescribing programme. Undoubtedly, this can get very complex and makes the need for both fully trained staff and digital technology to help manage social prescribing referrals easier and help the co-designing of referral pathways for each individual.
Using software also allows commissioners to see people who are hardly reached or hardly heard getting the support they need within their own community, especially in more marginalised areas.
It is essential to provide a safe and secure mechanism to enable referrals from multiple sources to be received successfully by Social Prescribing Link Workers. This allows the process of co-designing referral pathways more efficient and less time-consuming so more time can be spent supporting the individual, as well as making managing social prescribing referrals more efficient.
3. Ensuring there is the ability for individuals to self-refer
Self-referrals are proving to be another popular referral source with more people self-referring into the local social prescribing infrastructure.
However, for this to take place social prescribing services need to be able to meet the capacity and demand and be fully resourced to have the ability to share, monitor, and report on caseloads.
4. Investment
In an ideal world there would be one integrated-system that would provide all the functionality to connect social prescribing across all regions of health, social care and other systems to avoid health inequalities. However, this is not possible, so commissioners need to make sure they invest time and money to understand social prescribing journeys and where referrals come from, as well as the gaps so the integration needed is person led and not software led.
5. Funding
Currently even though social prescribing is written into strategies across the UK and Ireland there is no core funding. For community partners to receive referrals for Link Workers and have a specific budget for the digital software they can use to help manage and upscale their service core funding is vital.
It has not been announced whether the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS), which has been funding social prescribing link workers’ salaries, will continue after the end of March this year. This is why it is essential that social prescribing programs and services never solely rely on funding stream when they are organising their social prescribing funding, and instead set up multi-funding streams to help make social prescribing more sustainable in the future.
Social Prescribing Day 2024 – What are the best ways to support it?
Every National Social Prescribing Day we have massively got involved at Access Elemental Social Prescribing. Last year especially was a poignant year to celebrate as it marked 10 years of Access Elemental. To mark this occasion, we visited many of our customers and delivered cupcakes to them to celebrate the day altogether.
Below is just one example of the team handing out cupcakes last year, which we cannot wait to do again this year too.
But what are the best ways you can support it this year? Below is a list of the 5 top things you can do this Social Prescribing Day.
- Use the hashtag #SocialPrescribingDay to share before and on the day
- Download the National Academy Social Prescribing’s Social Prescribing Day Toolkit
- Organise events to raise awareness
- Engage Communities
- Celebrate your social prescribing journeys and share your successes and goals for next year
What is the future of social prescribing?
As this article has explained the demand and evidence for social prescribing has been increasing and has continued to grow to be more accessible to suit people of all ages and backgrounds. But it is still not properly resourced nor is its potential fully recognised.
One of the biggest solutions to allow this to happen is allowing social prescribing services access to digital tools to enhance programme delivery, standardize processes, and be able to record and monitor outcomes more effectively.
Through using integrated software commissioners can be fully aware and appreciate the time and resources spent on each social prescribing journey and be more flexible in helping manage Link Workers limited time.
Here at Access Elemental Social Prescribing our digital social prescribing platform aims to empower organisations to establish, scale and measure the impacts of social prescribing more efficiently. Our two-way integration allows our platform to connect with leading GP software systems. We are also able to integrate with other directories in your area.
We offer additional modules to make the planning and organising of referrals and monitoring of outcomes even more seamless. Our Elemental Analytics module for example helps link data sets across sector specific systems and display the results in bespoke dashboards to help digitize your evidence for social prescribing.
Whether you are a small or large social prescribing service, discover our social prescribing software today and learn what benefits you can experience from our integrated software to help you manage your referrals more efficiently and allow individuals the access to the best social prescribing journey possible.
Contact us today for more information about how we’ve worked with other social prescribing projects and how we might be able to help you secure funding, evidence impact and more.