Further 'social prescription' to ease GP pressure

NHS England plans to increase the number of workers trained to prescribe social activities, like exercise groups and art classes, to GP patients who don't need pills.

The NHS says that more than 1,000 ‘link workers’ will be recruited by 2020-21 with the aim to support GPs and reduce their workload. Focusing on long-term improvements, NHS England says that it wants link workers to handle around 900,000 patient appointments a year and that 2.5 million people would benefit by 2024.

It has widely been thought that a significant number of appointments at GP surgeries are not directly related to medical conditions, and patients are instead anxious or lonely or need support with managing a long-term condition.

James Sanderson, NHS England's director of personalised care, said: "A further 2.5 million people will benefit from personalised  care by 2024. A one-size-fits-all health and care system simply cannot meet the increasing complexity of people’s needs and expectations, so we’re setting out how people who live with multiple long term conditions can expect the same choice and control over their mental and physical health that they have come to expect in every other aspect of their life.

"Social prescribing is an important component of the NHS comprehensive model of personalised care and there is emerging evidence that it can lead to a range of positive health and wellbeing outcomes for people, such as improved quality of life and emotional well-being. The aim is that social prescribing schemes lead to a substantial reduction in the use of NHS services, including GP attendances."

Nikita Kanani, NHS England’s Acting Medical Director of Primary Care, said: “We will be recruiting a substantial number of people to support general practitioners over the next five years, to help ease the workload and pressures that we know general practice is under. But we see the network of social prescribers as a fundamental change to the way primary care operates and vital to the future. Recruiting social prescriber link workers will be a priority target as a part of the Universal Care Plan.”