|
Mersey Care forms new social
prescribing partnership to develop its Life Rooms support
MERSEY Care NHS Foundation Trust has
joined forces with tech for good company and social prescribing specialists
Elemental Software to improve the way that it refers patients to help and
support at its Life Rooms Centres, in Walton and Southport.
The Life Rooms is Mersey Care's state of the art centre for learning, recovery,
health and wellbeing. In 2016, its centre in Walton opened its doors after the
NHS Trust saved the historic Carnegie building at the former Walton Library in
North Liverpool. Following its success, another centre opened in Southport in
2017.
As a leading Mental Health Trust and 1 of only 7 NHS England Mental Health
Global Digital Exemplars, Mersey Care will use Elemental's unique digital
technology to transform its referrals process through its Pathways Advisors, who
are based at the Life Rooms and help people using the centre to identify help
and support on issues including finding employment, housing, managing money and
enrolling on Recovery College courses.
The aim of the partnership is to enable more people to engage with the Pathways
Programme, provide them with more choice and to free up capacity for the Life
Rooms team to help the people that need it.
It will also enable Mersey Care to better monitor and track the progress and
outcomes of the referrals it makes to understand the difference that its support
is making to people's lives.
Michael Crilly, Director of Social Inclusion at Mersey Care, said:- "The
Life Rooms has been a huge success, with over 22,521 people visiting the centre
in Walton since its opening, showing the huge need for this kind of support at
the heart of the communities in which we work. Quality, recovery and wellbeing
are at the heart of everything we do, and we are delighted to be working with
Elemental to enhance the way that we deliver support through our Pathways
Programme, significantly improving the way that we make referrals to non medical
support and crucially, enabling us to monitor and measure the real impact of
these interventions."
Elemental Co-Founder, Leeann Monk-Ozgul, added:- "Mersey Care is an
innovative organisation that is working to tackle some of the most challenging
mental health issues, and it is great to see that social prescribing is playing
such a big part in the development of the support it offers at the Life Rooms.
Social prescribing is increasingly being see as the way forward in delivering
real and lasting health and wellbeing improvements in communities, and our
software aims to makes it easier to refer, connect, support and measure the
impact referrals. We are looking forward to working with Mersey Care to support
its Pathways Programme and add real value in the way that it works with and
refers patients to different sources of support in their communities."
Elemental Software was set up by co-founders Leeann and Jennifer Neff last year,
following years of experience as community development workers in Derry,
Northern Ireland, after they recognised that the people that most needed support
to manage their own health and wellbeing were often not engaging in the
programme and services on their doorstep.
They developed a cloud based platform that connects health and social
professionals, social prescribers, patients and providers of community based
programmes and services to provide commissioners with the freedom and
flexibility to shape social prescribing initiatives based on their community
infrastructure and needs of their citizens.
They work with a wide range of organisations across health, housing and
community development to advise on the development of social prescribing
programmes and to embed their unique technology to enable organisations to
better refer to, and measure, social prescribing activities in their local
areas.
|
