Community Engagement Lead, Bharti Mistry, shows how effective social prescribing activities for older people can be delivered.
Key lessons from this case study
- Staff being known and trusted by communities helps build relationships resulting in participation by residents in co-designing and attending new initiatives.
- Having age and culturally appropriate processes and activities enables full engagement and a better experience for community members.
- Given the opportunity through capacity building, people can realise their leadership potential to help themselves and others.
What are the key components of delivering effective social prescribing activities for older people? 
The key components are:
- A trusted relationship,
- co-designing age and culturally appropriate activities,
- capacity building for sustainability.
Having an established relationships and trust between us and the community is key to any co-design or deliver activity. In Belgrave, people knew me, people trusted me. We already had relationships with session or activity leaders. In New Parks, we did not have pre-existing and trusted relationships and were starting from the beginning. This trusted relationship approach has helped us bring up issues such as financial issues which can be considered personal, stigmatising, or evoke emotional responses if control of their money is not in their hands.
Co-designing social prescription activities is important as otherwise they won’t be relevant, appropriate, wanted or attended. We worked in partnership with local people. People who took part were drawn from those that already using our services, word of mouth and project leader advertising, and attending local events.
As well as co-design, for activities to be age and culturally appropriate, understanding of the local community is crucial. As an Indian Gujarati Hindu woman myself, I understand the community, the cultures and health beliefs. I also have psychological and behavioural insights about the practical factors that encourage or discourage engagement in activities which helped the co-design. I speak the same language not only literally but figuratively. There are nuanced differences within the wider South Asian population so a person reflective of the same experiences, language and culture as local residents definitely helped.
To ensure sustainability, it’s essential to use community development and asset-based approaches or in other words – “do yourself out of a job”. The aim is for local people to recognise their existing capacity and confidence or to develop it and to take over and/or set up their own activities.
For more information about these approaches contact the National Lead for Older People via [email protected]