Intervention development for community-based self-referred social prescribing

Social prescribing is not new, but has gained popularity and significant political, policy, and health service traction in recent years. Each new Primary Care Network will receive funding for at least one additional social prescribing worker. There is a growing evidence base, however much of the focus has been on health-service models, mostly through primary care.

This is a good starting point but focuses heavily on interventions to help recovery rather than prevention. Additionally, whilst much is known about how these pathways function, little is understood about how the community (and VCS) who are delivering activities are impacted by these new referrals.

As a team with extensive expertise in delivering, researching, and being part of social prescribing, we feel there is an opportunity to develop a more formal pathway into existing community-based social prescribing activities, which we know have health and wellbeing effects, but without the heavy reliance on the health service 'scaffolding'.

In this project we will use a structured approach to design a future programme of community-referred social prescribing suitable for individuals to use and access community assets for their health. We will bring together a broad range of stakeholders with experience of designing, delivering and - most importantly - accessing social prescribing, to collect information about self-referrals in the community.

We want to understand how the systems work, how these structures interact and how to best support them to offer activities in the best way for individuals to attend and improve their health. We also want to explore how the coming expansion will affect those already delivering programmes.

We will produce guidance for this whole systems approach to social prescribing, including a detailed system map and programme theory for the proposed pathway and interventions. We will use our existing contacts, as well as those from people we work with for this project, to make sure our guidance reaches those in a position to benefit from it, and to influence service changes for the good of communities. We will then seek further funding to test whether this guidance works using primary data.