Social Prescribing and electronic patient records

Using data from the Whole Systems Integrated Care (WSIC) dataset to evaluate the impact and outcomes of personalised care across North West London

The Whole Systems Integrated Care (WSIC) dataset provides a major opportunity to evaluate the impact and outcomes of personalised care across North West London, and to inform national work. This project has two focuses, including:

  1. The patient activation measure (PAM) which measures patients’ knowledge, skills and confidence for self-managing their health and long-term conditions, and
  2. Social prescribing, a non-clinical intervention connecting patients with community support resources, empowering people with social, emotional or practical needs to improve their health and wellbeing.

Specifically, we have explored the association between PAM and health service utilisation, including primary care, outpatient care, admitted patient care, and A&E care. Further, we have examined who were offered social prescribing in North West London, and whether systematic differences existed between those who accepted or declined the service.

Elemental

An extension of this project involves using the Elemental dataset. Elemental is the most widely used social prescribing software platform in the UK. It currently contains data from 1076 social prescribing projects spread across the UK representing 35,000 prescribers (including GPs, nurses, practice managers, housing officers, local government staff and social workers), 4,361 link workers, and 358,635 patients. As Elemental is an active platform, these numbers are growing each month.

Elemental contains rich data on demographics (e.g. age, gender, socioeconomic status, geographical area, area deprivation etc), reasons for referrals (e.g. pain, mental health, social isolation etc), interventions prescribed (e.g. talking therapies, welfare/financial support, volunteering, exercise programmes, arts/cultural activities etc), and uptake and frequency of intervention engagement. However, formal analyses of this dataset are lacking.

Therefore, we are analysing anonymous data collected by Elemental to explore:

  1. What the impact of social prescribing is on individuals and the health service
  2. Which populations and patient groups are showing the greatest benefits from social prescribing,
  3. How differences in the way social prescribing is delivered to patients affect its impact.

This project can inform the design and delivery of social prescribing services in the UK, supporting the work of social prescribing service providers, healthcare professionals, clinicians and policy makers.

You can read about our first comprehensive analysis of social prescribing across diverse referral pathways in the UK on our blog or in our research paper Equal, equitable or exacerbating inequalities? Patterns and predictors of social prescribing referrals in 160,128 UK patients.

Funder

NHS England

Programme area

Epidemiology

Status

Complete

Principal Investigator

Dr Feifei Bu

Publications

Bu, F., Fancourt, D. (2021). How is patient activation related to healthcare service utilisation? Evidence from electronic patient records in England. BMC Health Services Research, 21 [DOI]