Over the last few months, our Head of Digital Systems Sonia Townend has been working with Northern Health Futures Hub, otherwise known as NortHFutures, and Dr Matt Cooper, a researcher from Newcastle University, to pilot a series of workshops designed to help those involved in social prescribing to harness the information at their fingertips so they can use it to secure more opportunities.

With several of these learning clinics having now taken place, in this blog post Sonia tells us about the themes the team has encountered so far.

Hear from our Perioperative Social Prescribing (PROSPeR) project partner Angela Telford, a Specialist Inpatient Pain Nurse with the ‘Waiting Well’ team at The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, who sat down with us to explain how the type of support advocated by Ways to Wellness through all our prototypes, is making a huge difference to patients waiting for surgery.

Ways to Wellness CEO Sandra Mitchell-Phillips recently attended The King’s Fund Conference on the government’s 10-year plan for healthcare in England.

Here are her thoughts on the event, which featured keynotes from both Health Secretary Wes Streeting, and North West Mayor Andy Burnham.

The government’s 10-year plan for healthcare in England, published yesterday, emphasises local, personalised, holistic healthcare, delivered by strong multi-disciplinary teams with non-clinical support at their core. For that to become a reality, good integration will be key. So we chatted to Tracy Huitson, Practice Manager at West Road Medical Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne, and our own Steffen Laukard about how they’ve worked together to bring this vision to life for our Persistent Physical Symptoms prototype.

Long-term conditions are a major driver of NHS costs, estimated to exceed £115bn each year, a figure reflecting the complexity of care needed by those with chronic conditions including asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), diabetes, arthritis, epilepsy, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, and heart disease. 

With this in mind, Ways to Wellness is sad to confirm that the project that led to our founding is to come to an end this summer, having supported more than 11,000 client journeys over the last 10 years. 

Ways to Wellness is paying its learning forward this #SocialPrescribingDay by investigating the ways in which the delivery of community health services can best support specific groups of people.

In addition to hosting social prescribing link workers operating within some of of our pilot projects and prototypes, we often take a role grounded in research in order to further our mission to tackle health inequalities. 

Case in point is a study we're involved in to identify the ways in which link workers can best support young mums and birthing parents with their mental health.