Social Prescribing: Engagement and outcomes for service users
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Social Prescribing: Engagement and outcomes for service users
IRAS ID
209616
Contact name
Julia Vera Pescheny
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Bedfordshire
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
na, na
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 7 months, 15 days
Research summary
Social Prescribing (SP) enables healthcare professionals to refer patients to navigators, in order to identify and meet patients’ psychosocial needs to improve their health and wellbeing. The role of a navigator is to assess patients’ psychosocial needs and support access to sources in the third sector by ‘prescribing’ an activity or service. Examples for prescribed activities and services are exercise classes, music therapy, lunch clubs, arts workshops, counselling, and befriending. SP recognises that health is determined by social, psychological, and economic determinants, and not only by biological factors and the quality of healthcare. It promotes partnership working across the health and social sector and widens the scope of primary care services to respond to the needs of patients and improve their health and wellbeing.
The study has two objectives:
1) To explore factors that affect service user engagement with SP
2) To explore the outcomes of SP for service users
To understand why service users engage and do not engage with SP can inform the design of SP programmes to improve service user engagement in the future. To explore the outcomes for service users is important for building and developing an evidence base of SP. This study will focus on engagement with- and outcomes of- the SP pilot in Luton. Therefore, all primary care patients that have been referred to the SP programme in Luton by their General Practitioner (GP) are eligible to participate in the study. Potential participants will be invited to a semi-structured interview, which will take approximately one hour. Interviews will be audi-recorded. The audio-recordings will be transcribed and all identifiable information will be removed (anonymised). The framework approach will be used to analyse the data. The study is part of a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), due for completion by October 2018.REC name
North East - York Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/NE/0389
Date of REC Opinion
22 Nov 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion