Digital social prescribing at Birmingham and Solihull ICB
New service from Access Elemental provides faster access for patients and helps to tackle rising demand for mental health support and primary care.
Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board (ICB) serves more than 1.6m citizens across six localities, 38 primary care networks (PCNs) and 182 GP practices. The ICB aims to ensure timely, consistent care and support for those in need – but, as with many healthcare providers across the country – is seeing rising demand for services.
Photo by Sarah Doffman
To tackle this challenge, the ICB has implemented social prescribing platform Access Elemental, with the aim of providing patients with the right access first time. ‘Social prescribing’, which is a major component in providing universal personalised care, involves directing a patient to local groups, activities and services that can meet their practical, social and emotional needs and so improve their health and well-being.
In June this year, the platform went live for GP practices across the ICB’s East locality. All stakeholders across that locality should be live and using the platform during September.
Next steps include integration with the NHS app and enhancing data analytics across the ICB’s six localities so that the impact of services across the region can be assessed more proactively.
The Access Elemental platform provides a unified system in which neighbourhood teams can work together, with stronger multidisciplinary teams built up through sophisticated integrations with leading clinical, social care and electronic patient record (EPR) systems. This means health and social care professionals can view a patient’s journey comprehensively while the wider determinants to health can be addressed, better supporting the wider community.
Access Elemental is the leading social prescribing platform in the UK and Ireland, providing highly accessible, coordinated and integrated care to nearly 400,000 citizens and patients. It’s used by a range of PCNs, ICBs, local authorities, education institutions, prisons, housing organisations, and community, voluntary and faith-based sector organisations.
For Birmingham and Solihull ICB, the advantages of the system include no longer being reliant on different spreadsheets and paper forms dispersed across providers to capture and manage referrals. This speeds up the process and helps more people to access services.
What’s more, individuals can log into the platform and self-refer at a time that suits them, without the need to see a GP in person. Given that accessing mental health services can have an associated stigma, the ICB team expects this option to help them reach more people in need.
Better continuity of care will also be achieved by having all information on one platform so that cases can be tracked more effectively. The system will be used for population health management across the ICB’s whole locality, which is one of the largest and most culturally diverse in the country.
Stephen O’Halloran, Business Manager at Birmingham East Central PCN, says: ‘We operate in an ethnically and culturally diverse patient population, and as an ICB, we have struggled to manage the socio-economic pressures that our patients face. Using digital social prescribing means we have a consistent referral and communication pathway across the ICB. We now have a robust and user-friendly platform to collaborate with colleagues, engage with patients, our regional leads, and the wider community. And the related analytics will help us report on the success of the projects and build ‘use cases’ as we move forward.’
Jennifer Neff, Co-Founder of Access Elemental Social Prescribing, adds: ‘With social prescribing currently being run differently across PCNs and ICBs, investing in digital helps those responsible for services to collaborate better, reduce health inequalities and improve community health and wellbeing. Social prescribing isn’t always seen as the top funding priority, yet it significantly eases primary care pressures. Partnerships like the one with Birmingham and Solihull showcases effective support for both physical and mental health in primary care.’
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