Social Prescribers are here to listen to you!

We need to know what matters to you and how we can best support you to reach your goal. The Social Prescriber will have that conversation with you and put you in touch with the people and activities that might help you to feel better and meet your goal or overcome your difficulty.

A Social Prescriber might introduce you to a community group, a new activity or a local club if you feel this is something that might be right for you. We can also support you by linking you with benefits advice or debt counselling or organising an appointment at the surgery for you with the Citizens Advice Bureau.

Social Prescribers can help you find information and guidance: a bit of inside knowledge on your situation or what local resources available to you, sometimes liaising with them to ensure you reach your goal.

We are involved with all sorts of voluntary and community services and can refer or signpost you to many options that will meet your needs. If we cannot find a service to meet your need then the Social Prescriber could even support you to create something new such as a gardening club, walking group, or book club within the community to benefit others as well.

If you would like to gain a better understanding of what Social Prescribers do, please take a look at these short videos.

Our Health and Wellbeing coaches work alongside the Social Prescribers providing regular coaching services to support people to develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence to become active participants in their own care so that they can reach their own health and wellbeing goals. They may also provide access to self-management education, peer support and social prescribing.

Coaches will support people to self-identify existing issues and encourage proactive prevention of new and existing illnesses. This approach is based on using strong communication and negotiation skills and supports personal choice and positive risk taking.

They will work alongside people to coach and motivate them through multiple sessions, supporting them to identify their needs, set goals, and help them to implement their personalised health and care plan.

We offer that via a series of 45-minute one-to-one coaching sessions to help set and achieve realistic goals relating to improved health and wellbeing.

This can work especially well for those living with a long-term health condition but is available to anyone who feels they may benefit from this service; you don’t need a special referral – just let us know if you think this service would work for you!

A Care Coordinator is the first point of contact for supporting our clinicians with the non-clinical needs of a person’s more complex long-term health condition. Care Coordinators also strive to assure the person is seen by the most appropriate clinician or clinic to achieve the best outcome for them.

We utilise the skills of our Care Coordinators who again work alongside our Social Prescribing colleagues and are often the first point of contact for any health and wellbeing need referral from the GP’s and Nurses. Care Coordinators provide extra time, capacity, and expertise to support patients in preparing for clinical conversations or in following up discussions with primary care professionals. 

The Care Coordinator will work closely with the GPs and other staff within the primary care network (PCN) to identify patients that might needs their support, and will make sure that appropriate support is made available to them and their carers (if appropriate), and ensure that their changing needs are addressed.

Our Care Coordinators also support people to utilise digital health options such as apps and other innovative projects that enable people to self-manage their long term health conditions more closely and independently whilst having the security of a team they can access if they encounter any issues.

Our Carers Lead helps us to maintain a register of all our patients registered with the surgery who have a non-paid caring role. We offer our registered Carers an annual wellbeing call where we utilise a team of trained and skilled Health Champions to assist us in this task.

We are therefore quickly able to identify those Carers who need further support and able to address in a proactive manner anything that may otherwise have escalated into a bigger situation.

We have a fantastic offering with regard to a Carers Support group, and regular events for our Carers with opportunities to take time out, seek help, and socialise which our Carers Lead organise and encourage our Carers to attend.

Our Carers Lead liaises with Carers Support Dorset who provide a county wide service specifically relating to the needs of Carers.

This enables us to help Carers seek respite care, benefits, and other offers which they may benefit from.

Our non-clinical Veterans Lead from the Wellbeing Team aims to support our Veteran community through signposting, regular reviews, identifying different socioeconomic factors that have implications on a person’s health and wellbeing. We really moved this forward from April 24 by trying to identify patients that were not registered as Veterans while also working with local and national support services to create a strong pathway to support our Veterans. Our Wellbeing Team have hosted and continue to plan to host social activities such as coffee mornings, and information events for our Veterans, keep an eye out for our next event coming in November 2024.

Keeping the Kids busy this Summer

We all know that keeping the kids entertained during the school holiday can be hard work, let us help you out with a few ideas of cheap family friendly activities this summer…

Our Mental Health Gateway Workers support those living with emerging low to moderate mental health difficulties.

They provide a listening ear, and signposting advice to what the best service might be for the persons individual and specific needs.

Mental Health Gateway workers have all experienced Mental health difficulties themselves at sometime in their lives and have the compassion as well as skills and experience that enables them to provide a key service and are a valuable part of the Wellbeing Team experience.

Our Health Champions are a group of people who voluntarily give their time to work with staff at their local GP practice to develop new ways to meet the health needs of their local community; champions help meet the non-clinical needs of patients, for example; Isolation, loneliness or learning to live well with a long-term health condition.

As a result this can mean some patients need to see their GP less often.

Champions work with the staff to develop responses to issues that they both feel passionate about and that are a priority to the practice. Examples include;

• Hosting a peer support group for people with a shared experience. Such as new parents, recently bereaved, carers or those coping with Cancer.
• Supporting patients to adapt, cope and live well following diagnosis of long-term conditions such as diabetes or COPD.
• Promoting and supporting practice campaigns such as  covid or flu vaccination clinics or screening programmes.
• Helping patients navigate both the practice (eg check-in screens, registering for online services, direct access clinics) and services in the wider community.
• Setting up welcoming social opportunities such as coffee mornings, hobby groups, craft groups or walking.
• Helping the practice develop different ways of doing things which improve services
• Helping people understand how best to access and use the services they need.

Most recently we have had examples of how practice teams and champions have worked together to address some of the challenges of Covid-19 including utilising them for friendly check in calls to those who were lonely and isolated, with grocery drop offs for patients isolating at home, sewing masks and scrubs for distribution, running zoom based virtual coffee mornings and singing groups and so much more!

Please get in touch if you would like to be involved!