Health and Wellbeing support for care experienced young people using a social prescribing approach

1. To create and set up a small team to take referrals of young people within our team’s cohort of young people.

2. To identify and build links with community organisations who could then provide equipment/activities for young people based on them identifying what would help them improve their Mental Health.

3. To manage the funding to ensure as many young people as possible could benefit from the project.

4. To evaluate the impact of the project and identify further funding streams to continue providing personal health budgets for young people to continue to participate in activities of their choice.

The health and wellbeing project has become an integral part of our services local offer to our care experienced young people.  The project is overseen by a senior social worker and part time business support manager who processes all referrals and activity payments.  Workers alongside young people, complete a simple health and wellbeing plan to identify their needs and any activity or ideas they may have to improve their mental wellbeing. 

This plan is reviewed periodically as part of Children’s services ‘My voice matters’ meetings and data is collected for project evaluation alongside case study evidence for further funding requests. 

It is difficult to measure the longer-term impact on the health of our young people given the short time the project has been operating, however the project has so far supported over 300 care experienced young people and the benefits have been of no surprise to us. Improved sleep, physical health, mood, self-confidence and new friendships to name but a few! 

We support a growing number of young people seeking asylum in the country and being able to provide gym memberships, push bikes and memberships to sports clubs has proved invaluable in helping give structure to their time (many have to wait to attend college courses), facilitate new friendships and help promote good health and restful sleep.  Overwhelmingly positive anecdotal and self report feedback, has been gained that demonstrate the benefits for what is comparatively little cost.

The project has been streamlined to reduce staffing costs and small funding streams have continued up to be identified from within as well as outside our council until October 2025.

Lessons learned:

1. Social workers and personal advisors are best placed to take the role as ‘social prescibers’, as they have established trusting relationships with young people they work with.
2. Ensure the bureaucracy around paperwork and funding allocation is kept to a minimum and ‘fits’ within current systems and record keeping and ensures response time between referral and engagement in activity is kept to a minimum.
3. Create a simple evaluation tool to review impact of the interventions supported and always use case study examples to tell a story.
4. Ensure safeguards and due diligence are in place with outside organisations being for service provision.

Darren Edwardes 

[email protected]