WHER E NEXT ?
Social prescription: coming up for air Michael Dixon Chair, College of Medicine
Social prescription has become a social movement whose ultimate aim is to create communities that make us healthy rather than ill. Its astonishing progress has been due in part to the altruism and passion of those who have been developing programmes throughout the UK. But it is also due to a growing recognition within the biomedical world that our current medical model is unable to solve the exponential increase in obesity, diabetes, stress, depression and even cancer. Social prescription represents ‘the other way’. Our second national conference on social prescription on 6 November is titled Social Prescription – Coming of Age. For the cause of holistic medicine and all that this journal represents, it is a final and irreversible ‘coming up for air’. As a national and international movement, social prescription was born three years ago somewhere around Reading on a train journey from Devon to Paddington. At our GP centre in Devon, Marie Polley, now co-chair of the National Social Prescribing Network, had just finished researching the effects of providing a social prescription to patients who were diabetic or at risk of diabetes. After nine months a third of them had converted to no longer being either diabetic or at risk of diabetes. ‘What next?’ we asked ourselves.
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Ten years into general practice, I was burnt out. Swamped by patients presenting with a range of problems from chronic tiredness, frequent minor infections, irritable bowel, headaches and back pain to stress, loneliness and sheer misery. Discovering complementary medicine gave me back my professional life and radically altered my views on how to heal and the importance of balancing the perspective of clinician and patient. The College of Medicine advocates an open-minded approach to health and healing that includes complementary medicine and other non-biomedical interventions such as the arts and healthy eating, which are being increasingly offered under the umbrella of ‘social prescription’, which is another college-led initiative.
We had been working alongside the Bromley by Bow Centre in Tower Hamlets, London, over several years to develop and provide social prescription but funding had always been difficult and frequently had to be sought through private sponsors. It was time to make the world – patients, professionals and media – aware of social prescription and to get it universally recognised and funded. Our first step was to bring together all those that we already knew were pushing the boundaries. We turned to innovators like Professor Chris Drinkwater in Newcastle West; Dr James Fleming and his Green Dreams project in Burnley; the work under way in centres at City and East London in Rotherham; Gloucestershire and of course Bromley by Bow. We formed a selfelected leadership group of around 12 clinicians and academics. Our next step was to invite anyone who might be interested or involved in social prescription to a meeting in London in January 2016. Having secured a Wellcome Trust seed award and support for a meeting from AbbvVie, we speedily arranged a conference in central London, expecting at most around 30 or 40 people to come. In spite of minimum publicity 150 people applied but we had to limit it to 100 because of space. It is a pattern
Volume 15 Issue 3 Autumn 2018
that has repeated itself over the past two years with every conference or meeting on social prescription being oversubscribed many months in advance. It became very clear before, during and after that first meeting (of what was to become a nascent National Social Prescribing Network) that all over the country patient groups, clinicians (especially GPs), clinical commissioning groups and local authorities were looking outside the biomedical box when it came to both care and improving the health of their local population. These initiatives had one thing in common – they were linking people to local voluntary and community groups. The initiatives varied from fishing clubs, knit-and-natter groups, singing, dancing, reading and theatre groups to green exercise, gardening clubs and yoga/Tai Chi. Remarkable projects with remarkable results came pouring out of the woodwork. Clearly an enormous wealth of pent-up energy had been working below the radar and was about to explode on to the national stage. By the time of our House of Commons launch two months later the national network had grown to 300 strong, and it has grown to well over 2,000 today. At our House of Commons launch in March 2016, Dr Sarah Wollaston, Chair of the Health Select Committeec
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