Who is Action Together?

Working with others

They work in partnership with a variety of other charities, infrastructure organisations and public bodies to collaborate on key thematic work for the community to promote and advocate the work VCFSE organisations are doing locally and across Greater Manchester.

Their team consists of 5 social prescribers and 2 Link Workers and they work closely with citizens to help connect them to activities that best meet their needs.

These activities help individuals to reduce anxiety, improve confidence and mood, reduce loneliness and isolation, as well as help individuals with long-term illnesses. They make it their aim to ensure every client has a unique experience with the team based on their needs.

Action Together provide micro grant funding for small charities and individuals who make a difference to the community’s health and wellbeing.

Action Together wanted to maximise the uptake and impact of their social prescribing service and demonstrate the difference it makes to the person engaging in the service, to the community, and to the health and social care sector, and that’s why they chose Acess Elemental Social Prescribing as their digital social prescribing partner.

Why did Action Together choose Access Elemental Social Prescribing?

They needed an integrated platform that was cloud based to suit their remote workers and strengthen their multi-sector partnerships across Greater Manchester and easily identify, reach, and engage more people in local community-based activities to address practical, emotional, and social issues.  

They selected Access Elemental Social Prescribing as they needed a social prescribing platform that accommodated their multiple partners, address their community’s needs and reporting efficiently and effectively to all their relevant stakeholders with real-time reporting.  Access Elemental helps them manage thousands of social prescribing referrals better to ensure every referral pathway is safe and secure regardless of who the referrer is. They needed a platform which would store all this information in one place to reduce the time spent on  administrative tasks, and reduce the need to have information inputted multiple times across a number of systems and spreadsheets. Access Elemental Social Prescribing offered them a platform that would enable them to grow their project and manage high levels of referrals to support them to embed safe and secure referral pathways through their multi-sector approach.

Access Elemental provides Action Together the opportunity to track every individual social prescribing journey at individual, neighbourhood, and population level, to provide more granular and high-level impact and outcome data to show the evidence for social prescribing to referrers, as well as explain the many benefits which social prescribing can deliver.

This in turn, enables Action Together to continue to grow and develop more referral routes into social prescribing, as well as help identify gaps in service provision to ensure all individuals can be supported in the community, regardless of the wider social determinant of health they could be experiencing.

How it works

Once a referral has been made to a Link Worker each client is provided with a wellbeing plan and connections to groups and services depending on their reasons for referrals. Their 1-2-1 sessions empowers individuals therefore to be able to choose and attend sessions which matter to them with a Link Worker’s support.

The progress made by each individual is recorded and automatically fed through to the system following results recorded from wellbeing surveys. In the last year alone 94% of individuals noticed an improvement in their health and wellbeing since engaging in social prescribing and 66.9% of individuals felt more satisfied with life.

Through our social prescribing software being able to record every step of every social prescribing journey Action Together has better access to all the information they need to prove to the wider community that social prescribing does work. It provides them the opportunity to secure future funding independently to ensure their service is able to continue and make a positive impact on their community in a time where further funding from the NHS is uncertain.

Access Elemental helps us to reduce pressure on health and social care teams by co creating safe and assured referral pathways to our third sector partner, making better use of preventative services. Access Elemental has transformed how the service is delivered and has allowed access to instant accurate reporting for our partners and commissioners.

Amber Henthorn, Programme Support Manager, Personalised Care Team at Tameside & Glossop NHS FT

What difference is being made as a result?

Since working with Action Together at the start of their social prescribing project it has been great to see first-hand how they have been able to grow year on year with our help. Our unique and innovative close working partnership has contributed to Action Together successfully delivering their aims and objectives to improve the overall health and wellbeing of individuals across Tameside.

1.  Increase the number of referral partners across the project by 15%

Ultimately their biggest achievement is that they have been able to continuously support the wider community and have been able to grow bigger and bigger each year. On average they now receive over 150 referrals a month across Tameside.

In the last 12 months alone Tameside has received 1,876 referrals and have seen a 15% increase of the variety of referrers issuing those referrals compared to the financial year of 2021/2022. Now 476 referrers across the community are referring individuals to Action Together’s social prescribing service including Physiotherapists and Neurological Rehab specialists.

Without using Access Elemental the Action Together team would not be able to manage the level of referrals they currently receive. This is because of our software positioning all case information into one centralised place so Link Workers, and Social Prescribing Officers can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on supporting more people in the community.

In the last 12 months Action Together have delivered over 13,000 appointments to social prescribing clients and connected these individuals to 455 different opportunities in Tameside.

2. Increase self-referrals to social prescribing services by 16%

The Access Elemental social prescribing platform has also helped Action Together to reach more people in the community by ensuring their self-referral option is just as seamless as any other route into social prescribing. Each month they are seeing more and more social prescribing self-referrals across Tameside. This year alone, Action Together has  seen a 16% increase in self-referrals compared to last year.

In Tameside we have established and nurtured over 400 referral partners who actively make referrals to our VCFSE social prescribing partners. Referral partners love getting feedback on the uptake and impact of the referral as this gives them confidence in the service and visibility on the difference, they can make to local community needs.

Amber Henthorn, Programme Support Manager, Personalised Care Team at Tameside & Glossop NHS FT 

3. 100% engagement from local primary care teams making referrals to social prescribing

Action Together is able to fully track every social prescribing journey from start to finish using Access Elemental.

 The two-way integration between Access Elemental and EMIS and Access Elemental and SystmOne allows referrals to be made by multi disciplinary teams in as little as 4 clicks from their GP system to the social prescribing service. More recently we have improved this integration even further to make it even easier to make, manage and report on social prescribing referrals more safely and effectively.

Some of these enhancements include Social Prescribing Link Workers being able to:

• Send back free text relating to the referral
• Send attachments including patient/ citizen social prescribing summary reports
• Additional SNOMED codes relating to social prescribing, wellbeing etc

These additional features allow Action Together to deliver more successful GP social prescribing by allowing both Link Workers and GPs to send and share as much information as they want to track social prescribing journeys better, instead of being limited to sending updates at specific trigger points in someone’s journey. Now Link Workers can send information back to GPs at any point in the journey to allow GPs to be more informed with patient progress. The additional SNOMED codes also help Action Together record potentially more complex social prescribing journeys better.

This will massively help Action Together’s working relationships with Primary Care Networks (PCNs) to help explain to clinicians further the benefits social prescribing can provide to the wider community, as well as help them save more time to spend time concentrating on helping patients with clinical issues instead of social ones.

This has been hugely beneficial since  Action Together’s Social Prescribing Link Workers became embedded in their local Primary Care Networks. Through using our social prescribing software Link Workers still are able to access the platform and input all the information they need to help co-produce social prescribing pathways to best meet an individual’s needs.

Without us working with Access Elemental from the start we really wouldn’t be where we are now with the increasing number of referrals from multiple different referral routes. The software constantly updating with more and more enhancements makes it even easier for us to grow our social prescribing project further and allow us to continue using our multi-sector approach to identify gaps in service provision, and address the unmet needs of the community better, safer, and more efficiently.

Abby Turner - Community Wellbeing Project Coordinator at Action Together

Great Customer feedback

A final way Action Together have been able to see benefits from using our social prescribing platform is from the feedback they receive from their clients.

On social prescribing day this year, over 50 cards issued to their partners included client feedback from clients who wanted to thank and congratulate the amazing work their Link Workers do and how they helped them to improve their health and wellbeing.

“ I contacted social prescribing to help with my Mental Health. Sue managed to help me get PIP which is notoriously hard to get. She helped me improve my life despite all the issues I have had. I would highly recommend people using this service if they have had any form of distress in their life.”

Social Prescribing Client at Action Together

In fact, 95% of clients said they would recommend Action Together Social Prescribing to friends and family and one of the main reasons for this is due to the time Link Workers have been able to spend with them. This has massively been possible due to our platform streamlining data processes to reduce the number of administrative tasks needed and the amount of time they take to complete.

This therefore has saved Action Together massive amounts of time so more time can be spent helping other members of the community, which is highly appreciated from their customer feedback.

The Future:

It has been great to work with Action Together since the start of their project. We cannot wait to continue helping them improve their service further, and share with them with our latest enhancements to our software in the coming months.

We are also looking forward to helping Action Together be able to collate their information on their Return of Investments (ROI) better so they can share their amazing work with commissioners to help secure future funding even further.

The release of our performance dashboard will help Action Together be able to achieve this by supporting the data required to help continue building their relationships with PCNs even further.

For more information on how best to implement social prescribing in your area like how Action Together have, download our social prescribing guide today.

Contact us now and find out first-hand how our social prescribing platform can help your social prescribing service deliver the best outcomes possible to improve the overall health and wellbeing of your community.