LAYMAN’S PER SPECT IVE
Social prescribing – a layman’s perspective Peter Donnebauer Layperson trustee of the BHMA; pioneering moving image artist and media entrepreneur
Social prescribing looks at patients’ wider social needs and makes referrals to community-based non-clinical services. 35 years after the BHMA was born, it can celebrate SP as a sign that holistic healthcare has at last gone mainstream. Crucially SP signals the fact that many problems can’t be solved by money or pills, and implies the possibility that (with help where needed) we can (and should) be more fully engaged with maintaining or recovering our own health and wellbeing. To make this possible GPs will need to be supported by liaison staff.
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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I have been interested in alternative approaches to drug-based ‘treatments’ since being prescribed tranquillisers for random panic attacks in my teens in the 60s. My instinct then told me that this was not treating the cause(s) of my condition; this was verified some five years later when I was one of the first people in the country to be officially diagnosed with hypoglycaemia. A week after the six-hour blood sugar test I had changed my diet accordingly and that was the last time I needed help from the medical profession for my ‘symptoms’. Medical understanding has moved on since then, and the internet is a powerful source of patient information, but my instinct remains to use drugs only as a last resort. I have been a layperson trustee of the BHMA for the past few years as it remains the only organisation committed to promoting a personcentred rather than a symptom-centred approach to ‘illness’.
Social prescribing IS holistic healthcare in practice An article in Pulse broke the surprising news that health regulator NICE is calling for GPs to signpost patients at risk from loneliness and isolation to local singing, arts and crafts and walking groups, to help them stay healthy and keep living independent lives. General practice could receive an extra £1 per patient towards improving access to social prescribing by 2017/18 according to NHS England’s clinical champion for social prescribing (Wickware, 2016). Social prescribing (SP) is all about looking at patients’ wider social needs in order to make referrals to community-based non-clinical services, ideally with the GP being supported by liaison staff. So, 35 years after the BHMA was born, it has cause to celebrate this as a sign that holistic healthcare has gone mainstream! SP is holistic even though its name comes straight out of the medical model in which the dispassionate professional observes, analyses, diagnoses and prescribes. Yet this raises an issue for me, because we ‘patients’ have too easily and for too long accepted that the doctor is
Volume 15 Issue 3 Autumn 2018
someone who knows more than we do about our ill-health or dis-ease, and can diagnose – ie tell us what is wrong, and then prescribe something for us, and then tell us what we need. Thankfully – and SP is a sign of this – there is at last a growing acceptance that the ‘something prescribed’ doesn’t have to be a drug. This is great news for patients, and possibly for doctors too. However, even if the doctor is correct about what we need, the social prescription is going to demand a lot more from the patient than a trip to the chemist and a prescription charge!
No more magic bullets? The fact is that many problems can’t be solved by money or pills. This is in itself a crucially important message. Instead, SP relies on the possibility that (with help) we can (and should) be more fully engaged with our own health and wellbeing. The social prescription moreover requires us to be actively involved in activities within our local community: a double whammy in that it will probably benefit not just the individual, but the community too, and the NHS as well of course. As a report published by the
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