The impact of ‘Connect well’: Social Prescribing programme funded by DHSC and West Kent CCG. A mixed-methods evaluation employing an implementation science approach. Quantitative Findings

The model was co-produced by Involve Kent, West Kent CCG, and a number of GPs, to initiate and pilot social prescribing in West Kent, to understand the challenges, opportunities and potential to expand. The definition of social prescribing used by DHSC is: “enabling healthcare professionals to refer patients to a link worker, to co-design a non-clinical social prescription to improve their health and wellbeing.”

The 2018 model proposed that: “we will target five GP practices across the CCG and work with them intensively to demonstrate the effectiveness of social prescribing in improving health outcomes and reducing demand on NHS services. We will target a diverse range of practices with different populations, in order to generate comparable data to understand under what conditions social prescribing is most effective”.

There was a commitment to support 200 patients at each practice with a full time Social Prescribing Link Worker. rching design of the evaluation is based on the RE-AIM framework (http://www.re-aim.org/). This framework facilitates collecting evidence of impact across a number of key dimensions (Reach, Efficacy, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance), capturing impact on individual and process outcomes by utilising both quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (interviews, case studies) methods.

Quantitative data