Social Prescribing
Many of the people we support through our PHITS (Personal Health Improvement Targets) project are referred to us from GP’s. This helps them provide a wider range of support for their patients. Traditional models of healthcare (GP’s, drug interventions and hospital treatment) alone often have limited impact on patients with health conditions relating to weight or mental health issues. More creative solutions that tackle the root causes of these problems often have more lasting results. Our partnership with Foxhill Medical Centre helped them achieve the College of Medicine Innovative Network Award.
“PHITS has been a tremendous asset to clinicians at the practice, as well as the patients who have made use of the PHITS scheme. PHITS enables doctors and nurses not only to advise general exercise, or participation in a healthy activity, but also offers a local service that will contact and advocate for patients as they make choices and start attending personally selected locally provided exercise classes and other activities” Ian Nerurkar , GP at Fox Hill Medical Centre.
By making links with GP practices we are able to provide;
Health improvement action planning
Health training
Healthy activities
Volunteer development that specifically meet the needs of the patients that we support
As defined in the North West Development Centre report – Social prescribing for mental health ‘a guide to commissioning and delivery’.
Social prescribing is a mechanism for linking patients with non-medical sources of support within the community. These might include opportunities for arts and creativity, physical activity, learning new skills, volunteering, mutual aid, befriending and self-help, as well as support with, for example, employment, benefits, housing, debt, legal advice, or parenting problems. Social prescribing is usually delivered via primary care – for example, through ‘exercise on prescription’ or ‘prescription for learning’, although there is a range of different models and referral options.
For more information see
We are currently looking for opportunities to make links with GP practices and Clinical Commissioning Groups who may be interested in establishing social prescribing referral routes for their patients through our organisation.
Benefits to patients
- Improved health and wellbeing
- Supports health and lifestyle change
- Improved self esteem and confidence
- Offer of accompanied visits
- More specialised local knowledge
- Speed of referral
- Allows time to be heard.
- A greater range of interventions
- Activities, training and advice that can help them address the route cause of their conditions
- Support that can help with wider life improvement issues such as housing and employment alongside health improvement support.
To GP practice
- More appropriate use of GP time
- Easy referral
- Increased range of practical services
- Improved access to psychological therapies
- Reduced levels of frequent attendance
- Reduced levels of inappropriate prescribing of antidepressants for mild to moderate depression
- Reduced waiting lists for counsellors and psychological services; and improved range, choice and availability of primary care provision.
- Improve effectiveness in responding to frequent attenders; and tackle underlying issues of frequent attendance.
Frequent attenders in primary care, defined as those who consult their GP more than 12 times in a year, represent over 15% of the average GP’s workload. Reducing attendance by one visit a year can lead to a reduction of 1% in a GP’s workload (Heywood, P, Blackie, G et al.1998: “An assessment of the attributes of frequent
attenders to general practice” Fam Pract 15(3): 198-204)
We believe that the referral expertise that we have developed in delivering our PHITS project since 1992 make us well placed to take on the role of a lead provider within a social prescribing system as outlined in the following report social_prescribing_report.pdf
