The Life Rooms - Case Study

The Life Rooms is a non-clinical service within Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. They work hard to address the non-clinical issues individuals have across the community to improve their mental health and wellbeing and reduce their dependency on both primary and secondary care.

They deliver an innovative social prescribing model of health in the North West, with this case study focusing on delivery across St Helens, Knowsley, Halton, and Warrington (Mid-Mersey boroughs). The Life Rooms can support with addressing the wider social determinants of health, and acknowledging how many factors can impact an individual’s health and wellbeing. Their services can support individuals take the next steps in being more proactive in looking after their mental health and wellbeing.

By offering a service that expanded across the four Mid-Mersey boroughs, The Life Rooms needed a solution that managed referrals better to enhance their reporting and help make their social prescribing model more sustainable in the future.

They needed a solution that would enhance their co-production across different stakeholders and clinicians to make it easier to make referrals and track different social prescribing journeys. It was essential for The Life Rooms that they also found a way to encourage clinicians to make referrals. To do this they needed to be able to make the process easy and accessible.

For all of these things to happen they needed to invest in digital social prescribing that would offer them more enhanced interoperability functions to connect the work that their Pathways Advisors (sometimes known as Social Prescribing Link Workers within GP practices) and Clinicians do together.

To improve opportunities for accessibility and interoperability, The Life Rooms decided to work with Access Elemental Social Prescribing.

In the last year, Mersey Care specifically has become the first NHS Trust in the UK to have interoperability between Access Rio (EPR) and Access Elemental. Having this interoperability was a great opportunity for The Life Rooms to improve both the speed and effectiveness of the referral process as well as its service user experience, and care.

Access Elemental Social Prescribing facilitated the interoperability between The Life Rooms social prescribing team and clinical multi-disciplinary teams, to offer streamlined and visible pathways of support.

Working alongside Access Elemental Social Prescribing, The Life Rooms were able to expand their services to support clinical teams and their service users in the four Mid-Mersey boroughs, improving accessibility and providing person-centred care and support.

The Life Rooms integrated both Access Rio and Access Elemental over a 12 month period in St Helens, Knowsley, Halton, and Warrington. Over these 12 months, their service has been revolutionised for the better both supporting service users and clinicians. This has allowed The Life Rooms to take a preventative care approach through working with key clinical and community teams to provide their  social prescribing and learning offers to make their services even more accessible for local communities.

1. Made their service more widespread

One of the biggest outcomes that The Life Rooms experienced was being able to make their service more widespread.

Since starting to use the Access Rio and Access Elemental integration, The Life Rooms received over 1,600 referrals and delivered over 2,000 social prescriptions, with 731 social prescriptions being made in St Helen’s alone.

Through working with us at Access Elemental Social Prescribing, all data and information from these referrals and social prescriptions have been able to be collected and stored in one centralised place regardless of which borough the referral has come from.

By being able to collect all the information from the referrals in one place, The Life Rooms have been able to collect and analyse the main reasons for referrals and adapt their social prescribing models to cater to every need and ensure there are resources to support with the presenting needs of service users.

Some of the main reasons for referral over these 12 months include 47% for mental health and wellbeing, 43% for financial and debt advice, and 29% for social interaction. During this time, The Life Rooms also saw a quarter of referrals being for housing concerns.

In total, there have been over 1,600 referrals recorded across 24 domains. Thanks to using our social prescribing software, The Life Rooms have been successfully able to manage the uptake in social prescribing as well as be able to track the impacts and provide evidence for social prescribing to make it more sustainable in the future.

2. Clinical Benefits

Another major outcome The Life Rooms has been able to experience since using Access Elemental Social Prescribing, and in particular, the Rio X Elemental integration, is the benefits it has given clinicians.

The Rio X Elemental integration allowed clinical teams across the four Mid-Mersey boroughs to have access to elemental functionality activated through The Life Rooms so they could make referrals directly to better address the social needs of the community.

At this point Pathway Advisors would be notified and would work together with clinicians’ notes and the individuals themselves to co-produce their social prescription. This, in turn also meant that clinicians could also monitor social support directly through Rio throughout the journey to see how social prescribing was benefitting them. This was crucial in helping The Life Rooms improve communications between stakeholders to deliver better person-centered care that matters to the individual.

To better understand the impacts this has had on clinical teams, The Life Rooms surveyed them to get reactions from the clinicians using this functionality every day.

One of the biggest benefits clinicians experienced was the amount of time saved. Previously before the integration, the clinicians surveyed could spend 27 minutes on average per appointment on social needs but once they were able to make a referral straight into The Life Rooms, this reduced by 70% to only 8 minutes per appointment on average.

Over 97% of clinicians surveyed felt confident making referrals since the integration went live with 94% of clinicians surveyed feeling confident that when referring a patient to The Life Rooms they would receive quality care.

The speed of the referral process, what I like about it, personally I don't know about my colleagues, but the drop downs. So, it's basically select from a bunch of options that you can signpost the person too, so it's not wishy washy for the patient, it's very structured and it's really direct. So yeah, literally four or five minutes if that and it's done.

Feedback from one of the clinicians that has benefitted from the integration.

I would say [I saved] in total approx. 9 hours and I have to come that number from reflecting on that I would probably have spent nearly 2 hours looking for services, approx. 5 hours on meeting with patients and maybe a further 2 hours on completing phone calls/tasks on behalf of the patient/s.

Feedback from one of the clinicians about the time saved since using the integration.

3. Benefits to the service users

Finally, another major outcome from The Life Rooms using Access Elemental and the Rio X Elemental integration itself is the impact it has had on individuals across the boroughs.

By using Access Elemental Social Prescribing, The Life Rooms has been able to provide quick access to social prescribing and learning support to address the presenting social needs of service users. Working alongside partner organisations, The Life Rooms could tailor the support needed for each service user and ensure they were being referred to the right services and support for them.

Some of the main social prescription categories individuals have been referred to include 32% going to benefits and money advice, 28% going to education and training services, and 25% of social prescriptions going to mental health support groups. Others also include 23% for mental wellbeing as well as 15% for housing and 8% for diet and nutrition support.

Here The Life Rooms were able to widen their access to support for communities in the four boroughs, across a variety of sectors as well as both physical and mental health. So much so that over 97% of service users in the last year agreed that accessing The Life Rooms was easy for them and 100% agreed they could speak about their issues, concerns, and problems with The Life Rooms staff.

After using the social prescribing service, over 92% of service users felt that it had a positive impact on their wellbeing and 86% of service users felt it had a positive impact on building relationships to reduce social isolation.

It has really helped me gain confident and knowledge. (Pathway Advisor) explained the course in a professional and friendly manner, and I really enjoyed it the courses has made me optimistic about my future.

Feedback from an end user after being referred to The Life Rooms.

For more information on the benefits both clinicians and service users have had since being able to use our Access Rio X Access Elemental integration learn more in their mid-term evaluation report today.

It has been clear that using both Access Elemental and our latest integration with Access Rio has been a huge success for The Life Rooms. We cannot wait to continue working with The Life Rooms and be able to streamline and improve further access to their services.

Since The Life Rooms have started to use Access Elemental Social Prescribing and be the first to use our Access Rio and Access Elemental integration, not only has our partnership been shortlisted for an award, we have won the National Association Link Worker Award for Partnership of the Year. We are so excited to receive the award and celebrate the benefits of digital social prescribing further.

We hope that as our partnership continues to develop we can help increase engagement with The Life Rooms’ social prescribing across more clinical mental health teams within Mersey Care to develop more multi-funding streams for them in the future, so together we can build a sustainable model of social prescribing that supports both clinicians and communities.

If you would like to know more information about how our latest integration works watch our latest webinar today where there is a live demo on how exactly it works and how it can benefit your social prescribing service.

Learn more about developing the best multi-disciplinary team to get the best social prescribing outcomes today by downloading our social prescribing across primary care guide now.

Contact us and let’s work together to save your clinicians time, enhance your collaborative working, but most importantly improve the mental health and wellbeing across your community both now and in the future.