What is Social Prescribing?

Its help that doesn’t come in the form of a medicine bottle and works to find ways to manage your needs in ways that suit you. Many factors influence our health and wellbeing, such as social, economic and environmental factors.

Referring patients to social activities instead of or as a complement to more ‘conventional’ forms of medicine is often called “social prescribing”. It can involve GP’s, nurses, link workers, and/or primary care professionals referring people to a range of local, non-clinical services. Its driver is to support individuals to take greater control of their own health. It can involve a broad selection of activities, such as volunteering, arts activities, group learning, gardening, befriending, cookery, healthy eating advice and a range of sports.

There are varied models for social prescribing, but most involve a link worker or navigator who works with people to access local sources of support.

Gloucestershire background

NHS Gloucestershire Commissioning Group (CCG) is a clinically-led statutory NHS organisation responsible for the planning and commissioning (buying) of health care services to meet the needs of local people. This includes the commissioning of local NHS services, and also increasingly of local Voluntary, Community & Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector services, in order to broaden and extend the offer to local people with an emphasis on prevention and self-care.

In 2014, Create Gloucestershire, NHS CCG Gloucestershire and other local stakeholders agreed to develop a more structured sharing of knowledge and best practice to support Arts on Prescription as well as wider arts and health practices. By working together the shared intention was to improve health, social and artistic outcomes and make the best use of the available resources.

The Creative Health report also includes case studies on Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group’s social prescribing programme and the Artlift arts-on-prescription scheme.

In 2018/19, 5 arts organisations in the Create Gloucestershire network have been commissioned by the NHS CCG to provide an Arts on Prescription service that will be delivered across several different clinical pathways. The 5 AoP arts and cultural partners are: