Care Merseyside - Case Study

Care Merseyside sits within the Cheshire and Merseyside ICS consisting of 16 trusts, local Primary Care Networks, GPs, and healthcare professionals from 25 GP practices. Social prescribing has been available across the ICS for the last 10 years with Care Merseyside playing a major part in that.

Using social prescribing at the heart of their service, Care Merseyside’s objectives include: enhancing education and training, relieving poverty and financial hardship, promoting good health and wellbeing, and providing recreational facilities for the local community.

Over the last ten years, Cheshire and Merseyside ICS, including Care Merseyside, have experienced several different challenges, arguably one of the biggest was scaling its social prescribing programme and continuing to do so to make it more sustainable in the future.

In 2009, when Care Merseyside was still in its infancy, not many people knew what social prescribing was, its benefits, and why it is important to the individual and the wider community.

Care Merseyside understands the impact that social prescribing can have on individuals and the wider community. They acknowledge that the wider social determinants of health can impact someone’s mental health and wellbeing. Therefore, they needed a solution that could help scale up their social prescribing service and help raise awareness about its importance.

They also needed a solution that could enhance their co-production approach to easily connect health, housing, community, and voluntary sectors to empower communities, and be able to offer a wider variety of services to best match every individual social prescribing need.

By finding a solution that could move them away from paper and manual processes, Care Merseyside could digitally transform their service to work with more organisations across the community to continue to improve the health and wellbeing of the community, as well as be reassured every patient will be put on a safe and assured pathway.

Care Merseyside has been using Access Elemental for over 6 years and has been hugely successful for the entire Cheshire and Merseyside ICS. They have been leading the way in using data-driven social prescribing to improve the health and wellbeing of their community for more than 6 years.

1. Enhanced their collaborative working

Since using Access Elemental, Care Merseyside have been able to build a stronger and more collaborative multidisciplinary team to work on addressing the social needs of the community as well as the clinical ones.

Access Elemental Social Prescribing has enabled every individual to have better social prescribing journeys by being on safe and assured pathways and only ever being referred to interventions that have been pre-approved on our Directory of Services all managed within Access Elemental.

Now no individual across Merseyside is at risk of being referred to an intervention or support service that is outdated or does not meet an individual’s needs so patients can attend a variety of non-clinical sources of support to enhance their health and wellbeing, such as employment initiatives, debt advice, and gardening.

By being able to connect different sectors and organisations, The Towerhill Community Centre Social Prescribing Programme has been able to work with the Big Help Project and Knowsley Foodbank to significantly reduce pressure on GP services and empower individuals to take greater control of their health and wellbeing. In the first year alone general anxiety in people who used the service was reduced by 43%.

2. Better ability to build a stronger and more sustainable service

In the last 6 years, Care Merseyside has had a pivotal role to play throughout Cheshire and Mersey’s ICS and has been able to consistently build their social prescribing programme, including a self-refer service allowing individuals to access the service both in person and online.

Now they have 77 sites and three social prescribing projects across Cheshire and Merseyside using Access Elemental to be able to achieve several different things including:

• Enhance their social prescribing offering
• Create easy, safe, and assured referral routes and patient pathways
• Track, support, and better measure the uptake of social prescribing to secure future social prescribing funding
• Reduce GP workload and help manage social prescribing referrals
• Reduce GP attendance
• Empower communities to support themselves

Something which enhanced their social prescribing programme further was being one of the first organisations to pilot our two-way integration with EMIS Web to help manage social prescribing referrals better. This allowed clinicians to make referrals within their system to be sent to a Social Prescribing Link Worker in a matter of 3 clicks.

Through this integration and using Access Elemental in general, admin time has reduced by 2 hours a day for clinicians. This in turn, has created a better flow of patient information, reduced the amount of admin needed to be completed, as well as enhance tracking of social prescribing for both clinicians and link workers to make it easier to report on PCN DES Funding for social prescribing.

3. Redesign their Service

One of the biggest benefits Care Merseyside were able to achieve since they started working with Access Elemental, is how they were able to redesign their service to accommodate to the everchanging COVID restrictions. This ensured that any individual across the community could still receive the help they needed, even if it was remote.

Here the service that was quickly developed was called ‘Phone a Friend- You’ll never walk alone.’ This new service allowed Care Merseyside to work with organisations across the community and follow a population health approach to identify the most vulnerable community members and directly offer them support to help reduce loneliness and isolation, as well as help with daily tasks such as delivering groceries.

Every single function that Access Elemental entails makes the effectiveness and efficiency of our project more robust and professional. We could not have had better support and professional advice.

Cathy Connolly, Chief Executive Care Merseyside

At Access Elemental Social Prescribing we have been thrilled to see the progress that Care Merseyside has made to develop their social prescribing service further. We cannot wait to see the further scaling of their digital social prescribing across the region and see how it will continue to develop across neighbouring PCNS.

As a result of choosing Access Elemental, they have been able to spend more time with people and concentrate on what matters to the individual instead of spending hours on admin, as well as offer safe and assured pathways to connect patients within hours of the referral to strengthen relationships with GPs and community partners.

We are looking forward to continuing our work with Care Merseyside and help them work with more organsiations across different sectors of the community to secure more multi-funding streams to make their service even more sustainable in the future.

For more information on how our social prescribing software can help your primary care setting have better safe and assured pathways and help prove the evidence for social prescribing learn more today.

Find out the best ways to digitally transform social prescribing across your primary care services by downloading our guide now.

Contact us and see first-hand how we can help you always improve your community’s health and wellbeing, whilst continuing to grow and make social prescribing sustainable both now and in the future.