There is emerging evidence that social prescribing can lead to a range of positive health and wellbeing outcomes for people, such as improved quality of life and emotional wellbeing.
59% of GPs think social prescribing can help reduce their workload.
In the NHS Long Term Plan, NHS England and Improvement committed to building the infrastructure for social prescribing in primary care:
- there will be 1,000 new social prescribing link workers in place by 2020/21, with significantly more after that, so that
- at least 900,000 people will be referredto social prescribing by 2023/24.
Social prescribing link workers are becoming an integral part of the multi-disciplinary teams in primary care networks (PCNs), or what you and I would know as GP practices. This is the biggest investment in social prescribing by any national health system in the world.
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Regional learning coordinator, Sarah Gorman talks about supporting social prescribing link workers in practice: