GAT HER ING EVIDENCE
Social prescribing and the development of the ‘evidence base’ Marie Polley Senior Lecturer in Health Sciences and Research; Co-Chair, Social Prescribing Network
After several years of working steadily with my co-chair Dr Michael Dixon, and the Social Prescribing Network steering committee, alongside regional leads, special interest group leads and research collaborators, I can now say that we all feel heartened by the evident progress social prescribing is making. When we originally won seed award funding from The Wellcome Trust, our aim was to research social prescribing outcomes, but also to understand the theoretical basis underpinning health creation in this context and to bring together a stakeholder network. I had in mind at the time a network of researchers who were undertaking pragmatic mixedmethods approaches to data collection, and to share how they were doing things. However, growth of the network has been so rapid that only in the last year have we started to turn our attention seriously to research. As my background is broadly as an academic and a researcher, I felt it was crucial to bring the research
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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I started my career studying biomedical sciences, and gained a PhD investigating the molecular components of cancer development – I’ve always been fascinated by DNA. While completing my PhD, I trained in Usui Reiki as I wanted to do something that would help to support my own health. I then practiced Reiki while carrying out my molecular biology research. After a post-doc contract in the Department of Cancer Cell Biology, Imperial College, I felt more called to work directly with people and I became an embedded researcher at Breast Cancer Haven where I evaluated the service providing complementary therapies for women with breast cancer – a great way to marry up my interest in complementary medicine, research and cancer. Through this position and in collaboration with Penny Brohn Cancer Centre, the Measure Yourself Concerns and Wellbeing (MYCaW) tool was developed and validated, a tool used internationally today. Over the past 15 years I have been pioneering ways to promote a more integrated approach to caring for people.
community together to review our findings, hear one anothers’ challenges and explore the research methods that were working and find out about those that weren’t. So, we held the first International Social Prescribing Network Research Conference at the University of Salford in June 2018: 15 presentations, 30 posters, a superb keynote from Dr William Bird, and all of this rounded off with a choir! Interactive feedback captured during the conference highlighted sustainable funding of social prescribing as the biggest concern, and realist mixedmethods research as the best working approach. Presentations and posters and a report from the conference are all available on our website (www.socialprescribingnetwork.com/ resources). Views on what ‘evidence’ is needed to support the expansion of social prescribing seems to be broadly determined by professional background, though not always so. Below I briefly examine the changing research paradigm we are living through, and
Volume 15 Issue 3 Autumn 2018
the challenges that researching social prescribing present.
The changing theoretical model of care The NHS Five Year Forward View envisions a more primary care focused service, in which, as The King’s Fund has commented, reducing health inequalities will be crucial. Such a shift in emphasis towards prevention (and wellbeing) implies a less biomedical, more biopsychosocial model of care that attends to the overlapping dimensions of human life. This is great news, though it presents many challenges for the worlds of research, policy and commissioning. 1 In the (bio)medical world, the dominant model is evidence-based medicine (EBM). EBM proposes a hierarchy of evidence depending on the designs and methods used to collect and analyse data. This implies that the method at the top
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