By Community Link Workers, Calum Barry (Health All Round) and Rebecca Goodman (Caring in Craigmillar)
Social prescribing is an approach for connecting people to non-medical sources of support or resources in the community which are likely to help with the health problems they are experiencing.
There are various models of social prescribing in place across Scotland. Many of these involve a social practitioner, often referred to as a link worker, social prescriber or community navigator, who works with people in a holistic, person-centred approach to link the individual to local resources.
Having been in post as Link Workers since 2017 we have experienced many changes in the role and the way it is received.
We have expanded from 4 link workers to 24 and now cover 45 practices across Edinburgh. We have seen services come and go, peoples’ needs change, and even worked through a global pandemic.
In the beginning, when the role was just getting established, of course we received lower referrals and our caseloads were smaller. This gave us the luxury of time, time to network with other services in our local areas and time to work more intensively with individuals, accompanying them to new groups and activities.
As the service developed and reputation grew, we saw huge increases in referrals and our caseloads expanded. A great result but with it of course comes less time and an impact on what we can achieve for people.
However, along with a change in referral numbers we also seen a change in need, a shift from supporting people to access social activities and wellbeing supports, to assisting more with basic needs such as financial issues, housing, welfare rights, and access to food banks.
Although we are not a crisis service, increasingly we find ourselves working with those that are in crisis now.
It can sometimes feel far removed from the days of accompanying someone to an art group or cooking class. These things do still happen but it may take multiple appointments to get to this outcome and we may not have the capacity to commit to this.
People struggle to consider attending a group they might enjoy which could benefit their mental health, if they can’t afford the bus to get there, wonder if they will have money to put the heating on, or are worried they may be facing eviction next month.
Link Workers can help them to access the services they need to help tackle these huge priorities, so they can then have the capacity to start thinking about the other stuff. Without having link workers and other services within the GP practice teams some of these vital links may never have been made.
People’s needs are greater than ever and so the Link Worker role feels more important now than ever before.
[…] Link Working – more important now than ever. […]