Social Prescribing in Lambeth: What You Need to Know

Social prescribing is a service offered in primary care which aims to connect people with community services that meet their practical, social and emotional needs and aid their health and wellbeing. A service increasingly used in England, it sees link workers listen to people and connect them with services. To learn more, we spoke with Tinka Gordon (a social prescribing link worker) and Raj Mitra (a GP partner) at Lambeth Walk Group Practice.

Please can you tell us a bit about what social prescribers do? 

Raj: Social prescribers are a very important part of the primary healthcare team. They help us help patients with issues that there isn’t a medical answer for in terms of medications or referrals or tests; for example, feeling lonely and getting connected to activities in the area. They’re sort of networkers... they take a huge workload off us. For a lot of people’s problems, the NHS hasn’t got an answer, so communities need developing and supporting to help themselves. Our ultimate aim is for social prescribers and the Neighbourhood Wellbeing Delivery Alliance to work with providers so our community can become more resilient and tackle its own problems. 

What challenges are you seeing in delivery? 

Raj: We’re picking up a lot of need. We’re a small team and need the system to shift its funding from treatment to prevention. [People] don’t want to go to hospital. They want to go to yoga and exercise and have nice food and warm houses and jobs and all those things that are the wider determinants of health.

Can you tell us more about social prescribing activities? 

Tinka: If the right services are there, patients will attend. Our most successful and well attended activity is the yoga classes we deliver inside primary care. We were lucky to receive funding for a pilot which then led to this provision being funded by the Neighbourhood Wellbeing Delivery Alliance. Another successful provision was a regular walking group we initiated with Black Prince Trust. These sort of provisions are really needed and I’d like more organisations to come forward to collaborate with us, as we don’t always have the capacity to do this. It’s very time intensive work.

Tinka: Social prescribing link work is patient centred, so it’s important they drive the direction of sessions. Ultimately, they have to do the work and commit to helping themselves. I see my role as reminding patients of how resourceful they are and can be. It takes time to change embedded patterns of behaviour. We talk about what changes the patient would like to see in their life.

How does a typical day look for a social prescriber?

Tinka: Two out of five GP appointments are for mental health, that’s 40% of all GP appointments taken up by mental health issues. A lot of people from all backgrounds are struggling to live balanced meaningful lives. So, when a patient is referred to me, my first question to them is: ‘How are you, how is your life right now?’ I’m not paying too much attention to why they have been referred but want to get a feeling of the quality of their life – what is it like to be in their shoes. And this can take time. The first session is open ended; I want the patient to feel deeply heard, then the real work can begin.

Tinka: It’s important for link workers to deliver these services within primary healthcare settings. Patients put a lot of trust in their GP’s and when a service is delivered by the practice there seems to be stronger attendance and commitment. The role I perform is only as effective as the available resources. I believe that our role can be strengthened by having a budget to deliver patient led services directly from Primary care. It’s a very effective way to work, but it means that link workers need their own budgets to get some of these services off the ground.

To learn more about social prescribing, click here.