Who are Age UK Barnet?
Age UK Barnet work under Barnet Council in partnership with other voluntary organisations to provide a wide range of services and activities to best meet the needs of the older people in their community.
They wanted to ensure that every person had access to social, practical, and emotional support whenever they needed it to reduce the demand of primary care services and offer more preventative and lower-level community support instead.
Age UK Barnet believed that through doing this communities would feel more empowered to take control over their own wellbeing.
Why did Age UK Barnet choose to work with Access Elemental Social Prescribing?
Age UK Barnet needed their social prescribing offering to be both universal and consistent across Barnet so no individual went without the care and support they needed.
They needed a platform that could ensure that voluntary, charity and the social enterprise sector could be involved to maximise their local community assets to support improvements in individuals health and wellbeing.
Age UK Barnet have 48 GP practices which they needed to support. They chose Access Elemental Social Prescribing as our social prescribing platform offered them a system which could accurately record their referral data so they could understand which GP practices were engaging less and less. This information allows Age UK Barnet to offer more training and resources to increase the usage of their service further and help reduce the pressure on primary care services.
When they started to work with us at Access Elemental they had three clear objectives:
- To improve the accessibility and diversity of the services available to patients
- Gain better understanding of the local community including the reasons for referral to easily identify gaps in services and adapt as needs change
- Make GPs and Health Allied Professionals make more social prescribing referrals
The Outcomes:
Since Age UK Barnet started working with us in April 2020 they have been able to grow massively. In the last 12 months alone GPs across Barnet have made 7122 social prescribing referrals.
Using our social prescribing software has allowed Age UK Barnet to continue to expand its social prescribing service by having all the information on every individual’s social prescribing journey centralised into one place. This makes it easier than ever for them to manage their social prescribing referrals better despite social prescribing journeys getting more and more complex.
Now all 48 GP practices are equipped to make referrals to the service making it even easier for non-clinical support to be given to patients quicker than before, whilst helping to reduce pressure and workloads on GPs.
Download our Social Prescribing across Primary Care guide to learn how to overcome the challenges of social prescribing
What have Age UK Barnet been able to achieve since they started working with us at Access Elemental Social Prescribing?
Over the last 3 years Age UK Barnet have seen two majors improvements in their social prescribing service:
1. Better report and record keeping
Ultimately one of the biggest achievements Age UK Barnet have been able to achieve since they started working with us is that now they have better reporting and recording keeping. This helps to show why PCN social prescribing is important to reconnect patients to their community.
Not only does this help their social prescribing service continue to grow further, it helps to keep saving time on administrative tasks regardless of how big their service gets. This is because our Access Elemental Core module offers robust reporting and analysis as well as an inbuilt Directory of Services that can integrate with other Directories in the area. This made it even easier for Link Workers to signpost individuals to the activities that matter to them the most, as all the information needed could be found in one place.
This reduces the need to spend long hours inputting information into a system, researching for services, relying on manual processes, or having to search through multiple spreadsheets.
With better and more robust reporting and analysis, Age UK Barnet have been able to deliver social prescribing to more individuals year and year and easily adapt their services as needs change.
Their team is very confident with using the system which has allowed them to use both a population health management and co-production approach. This has allowed them to easily share datasets with public health teams and local authorities to identify needs and service gaps across the community to help improve the accessibility for more targeted cohorts of patients.
2. Better engagement and feedback
One of the other major achievements Age UK Barnet have been able to achieve since they started working with us is that they have received both better patient engagement and feedback.
The latest wellbeing scores they have collected have shown that Patients had an increase of 75% in feeling more satisfied with their lives post social prescribing interventions. 77% of patients reported back an increase of feeling happier overall after social prescribing interventions and anxiety levels reduced post social prescribing for 78% of patients seen through this service. Overall through using Access Elemental they have been able to showcase back to GP surgeries that 65% of all patients seen have reduced the number of GP appointments post social prescribing interventions.
The improvement in wellbeing scores since patients have engaged with Age UK Barnet’s social prescribing service shows the benefit of linking people to community-based services that provide co-ordinated, integrated and proactive care.
Through offering safe and assured pathways clinicians are now reassured that their patients are being referred to a safe service as well as having the ability to see evidence of their progress. Our Access Elemental platform allows patient data to pass through a safe gateway so all the information needed is easily accessible to prevent the risk of both data breaches and the need to duplicate data from one system to another. Because of this clinicians are now able to spend more time focusing on patient’s clinical needs instead of social ones.
Access Elemental Social Prescribing helps us to reduce pressure on health and social care teams by co-creating safe and assured referral pathways to our 3rd party sector partner, making better use of preventative services. It has transformed how we deliver our service and how we report to our partners and funders.
Caitlin Bays, Programme Lead at Age UK Barnet
The Future:
We love working with Age UK Barnet and we are looking forward to help further strengthen the VCSE sector in Barnet by enabling access to the platform across the borough. This way we can help monitor social prescribing referrals more efficiently and support bids for more funding for their services.
This will be crucial as by 2024 it is unknown whether social prescribing will still have funding provided by the NHS. Our work with Age UK Barnet is crucial therefore to help them be able to demonstrate evidence for social prescribing and show the impact it has on their community.
For more information on how to implement social prescribing right in your local community download our social prescribing guide today.
Contact us and see first-hand how our easy-to-use social prescribing software can help revolutionise your social prescribing service for the better and help improve your community’s health and wellbeing, whilst allowing them to become more independent in managing it and less dependent on primary care services.