Evaluation of Salford Health Matters Social Prescribing Project
January – December 2009
Social prescription is a mechanism for linking patients in primary care with non-medical support in the community. Salford Health Matters (SHM) started providing a social prescribing project (‘Refresh’) in the late summer of 2008. Later in the year, Acton Shapiro was commissioned by SHM to evaluate whether the project was meeting its objectives in addressing issues such as poor mental health, social isolation and work-limiting illnesses within its population.
There were two phases to the evaluation:
- The first phase, which ran from January to March 2009, involved a survey to gather the views of referrers, an analysis of the database set up to gather demographic and health data from patients participating in the programme and short face-to-face interviews with patients at a drop-in session in order to find out what they thought about the service and whether it was meeting their needs.
- The second phase, which ran from September to November 2009, broadly repeated the data collection methods used in phase one but referrers were consulted through telephone interviews and patients were interviewed by telephone as well as face-to-face. Running concurrently with the two phases of the project was an analysis of the sustainability of the social prescribing initiative in relation to the NHS Performance Agenda and Primary Care’s Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF).
An interim report was produced in April 2009 and the final report in December 2009. |
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