We are big fans of social prescribing. It goes to the very heart of what we do, trying to get an understanding of all of the issues that people have in their lives and tackling everything in a systematic way; whilst taking into account that the social issues are just as important as the medical issues.
The idea that you need to carry out a whole person assessment and need to be able to easily to refer people to accurate local resources is baked into our Referral Tool. It’s the reason it exists.
We’ve written before about some of the challenges of social prescribing but we’ve not provided a simple explanation of what it means. It’s a term that has been created to get GPs to buy into it. That’s fine as you need the referrals from GPs to make it work, unfortunately, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to the people that use the service.
We decided to make a short video to explain what social prescribing means, some of the features of it and some of the challenges. Hopefully, you might be able to use it in your work to promote a better understanding of an exciting element of the health and care system.