More Than a Prescription: Building Community for Better Care with Dr. Kate Mulligan and Liv Mendelsohn
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How is social prescribing reshaping modern healthcare—and what could it mean for patients and caregivers?
In this episode Dr. Kate Mulligan and Liv Mendelsohn discuss what social prescribing is, its impact on health care, and the need for investment and policy change to embed the practice in care systems.
TRANSCRIPT
Misty Pratt
Imagine this- you’re sitting in your doctor’s office expecting the usual recommendation, a prescription refill, maybe a referral to a specialist, but instead, you walk out with something different, a prescription for an art class or a walking group or a community choir. It might feel unexpected, but it’s part of a growing movement called social prescribing, a way of supporting health by connecting people to community creativity and meaningful social connection.
Today, on In Our VoICES, we’re diving into this movement with two guests who are shaping how care looks across Canada. First, we’ll hear from Dr. Kate Mulligan, an award winning health geographer, implementation scientist and policy advisor who helps to grow systems that strengthen community and neighborhood leadership for health, equity and resilience around the world. Kate is also a member of ICES’ Scientific Advisory Committee.
We’re also joined by Liv Mendelsohn, executive director of the Canadian Center for Caregiving Excellence. Liv leads national efforts to strengthen the systems and communities that support caregivers and care providers across Canada, drawing deeply from her own lived experience as a lifelong caregiver and member of the sandwich generation.
Together, we’ll unpack why social prescribing is gaining momentum, how it works, and how something as simple as engaging in the arts, culture or nature can play a huge role in improving health. Kate and Liv, welcome to In Our VoICES.
Kate Mulligan
Thank you very much.
Liv Mendelsohn
Thanks for having us.
Misty Pratt
Kate, you wrote in Maclean’s magazine that social determinants account for up to 80 per cent of our health. Can you explain to the audience a bit what that means?
Kate Mulligan
Yeah, that is about the things that influence our health outcomes, and so up to 80 per cent, somewhere between 50 and 80 per cent depending on the research estimate, is caused by things that happen outside of the health care system. The doctor’s office, the hospital, the clinic, and that is mostly in community factors. Where we live, where we work, where we play, the relationships we have, our income, the health of our environment, all of those different factors are really important when it comes to health. We have millennia of experience living that way, and decades of research to back it up, and now it’s beyond time to start taking more action on what we know within the healthcare system.
Misty Pratt
Yeah, and I gave a few examples there of what social prescribing is about. But is there an agreed upon definition?
Kate Mulligan
There is so together with one of my PhD students a few years ago, we created a globally accepted definition for social prescribing using a Delphi process where experts from around the world weighed in on what they thought the key components of a model for social prescribing are. And I think it is important to note that those are really principles, and that the work of social prescribing is quite broad, writ large. But the basic idea is that a person who has more going on with them than the clinical health care system can really help with is referred to social prescribing, so activities outside of the health care system that can support our health and well being, like the ones you mentioned, art classes, walks in nature, social groups, but also sometimes more deep support material, supports for income or housing or food, caregiver or patient support groups, all of those kinds of things also are considered to be part of social prescribing. But there are a couple of innovations that make this different from previous approaches to a more clinical version that they call social screening and referral.
One of them is that you usually have access to what we call a link worker or a community connector that is a peer or somebody else from your community, not overly professionalized in their role, who gets you, who has time to listen to you, who has time to shift the conversation from what’s the matter with you, which is that more clinical gaze, to what matters to you, and to help you make a plan to take action on that so that you don’t just get a referral to something that’s not meaningful or accessible to you, but that you get support to participate in your community in a way that makes sense and works for you. And in so doing, you’re reminded that not only it’s about what matters to you, but that you matter, and that is something we don’t often encounter in healthcare, I think, especially these days, when we often worry that we might be a burden to the healthcare system, where people are stretched, and in social prescribing, we’re welcomed in and shown that we do matter.
The one other innovation that I’ll mention is the tracking. So through social prescribing, we’re finally able to more systematize what might have been happening ad hoc with the odd physician or other healthcare provider and find out finally, what it really means to someone’s health experiences, health outcomes and use of health services when they are referred to these non-clinical programs. And we can use that learning to better invest in the kinds of community supports that we’re seeing are most necessary and most impactful, and we can do that in a very hyper tailored, precision community health way for individuals and local communities.
Misty Pratt
And I also wonder too, if it’s like, I think many of us believe that our health is something that we control, something that we have power over, and so we tend to put all that power onto the individual to say, you know, it’s about like, are you taking your medication? Are you exercising? Are you eating well? And so it sounds like this is much more about factors outside of that, factors that sound like they have a lot more impact on our overall well being.
Kate Mulligan
Well, it’s rooted in health promotion, which really is about helping us gain a little more control over those things that might seem outside of our control or be outside of our control. That’s the basic definition of health promotion. But not just for individuals, for communities too, helping us together collectively get a bit more power and more resilience over some of these factors that we don’t have as much control over. And I think the most important thing in there is that we get support. So for all of us, it’s difficult in a busy life with many, many different pressures on us to do the things that we’re told are healthy, to eat a certain way, to move a certain way or a certain amount, all of those kinds of things can be really challenging. And if you’re experiencing social isolation, exclusion, illness, stress, those are all barriers to getting started and to continuing.
So social prescribing recognizes that those barriers are real, that we don’t always have a lot of control over them, but that we can gain control, that we don’t just treat people as passive recipients of clinical or community services. So again, that’s difference from the old social screening and referral, where we might just refer services at people, and then if we took them away, they’d be no further ahead. This is meant to be supportive of our empowerment, so that we can self manage a bit more together and on our own in the context of our actual, real lives and actual relationships, so that we’re not just in a cycle of return visits to the clinic when we can’t do the things in the real world outside of the lab or clinic environment. It’s a little bit more than just being referred to things for things that are outside of our control. It’s about building that control and power a little bit more, taking back a bit more of that power in our lives with the help we need, not just being told to go do it.
Misty Pratt
Really active participation. So, yeah, so Liv we tend to think, you know, we’ve been talking a bit about social prescribing as supporting the person, the patient themselves but how does this model or movement support caregivers? So the community and the organizations and everybody who are, you know, providing that support to the person who may have an illness?
Liv Mendelsohn
Social prescription is an ideal approach to support caregivers. Caregiving in Canada is widespread and an almost universal experience. Support is not. So one in four Canadians is a caregiver now, half of all women are and as we have this aging population, that’s that’s really going to be the situation for every Canadian family, and we know that caregivers actually are doing a great deal of the care in our system. Caregivers provide three hours of unpaid care for every hour of care in the system. And caregivers aren’t doing well, you know, we are getting better at identifying holistic and non-clinical supports that will support the patient. We need to widen the aperture and look at the family, look at the caregiver and the network of care, because our communities are actually made up of these networks of care and if we want to strengthen community and we want to see better health outcomes for people, we need to support the caregiver.
When the caregiver is struggling, the health outcomes for the patient plummet, so it’s in all of our interest. And you know, when you’re providing care, I’m a caregiver multiple times over right now, your world shrinks because you become very isolated. It’s hard to get away, it’s hard to do all of those things that Kate is talking about to connect to community. So when you’re looking at supporting caregivers, the social prescription approach combined with respite, so caregivers can get out, can reconnect with their friends and their community, can do something that fills them back up, then we’re able to be these resilient caregivers that the system expects us to be. The average length of time someone is caring for a loved one or a friend in Canada is 4.6 years. So it’s not this like short acute period. It’s a marathon and not a sprint. And we need people to be able to access those supports, because caregivers face social isolation, anxiety, depression, all the health outcomes, all the stress based health outcomes, lack of sleep and that lack of a predictable break is a huge issue for caregivers. So when Kate is talking about social determinants of health, we need to actually understand that caregiving is a social determinant of health.
There are direct impacts from caregiving, and the NHS in the UK has actually identified caregiving as a social determinant. When you’re in a caregiving role, you are in many ways more vulnerable, and you need that support. So we know a lot of caregivers get burnt out, not because they don’t love and want to care, but because unsupported care is just unsustainable. So from our perspective, social prescription strengthens all the community organizations who you know we rely on to provide those opportunities for caregivers, and it formalizes this, this web, in a way, so that we can see it and we can grow it.
Kate Mulligan
I couldn’t agree more. And I think a really important contribution of social prescribing is to make visible this web of invisibilized and devalued labour that is actually propping up our health system and Liv and the Canadian Center for Caregiving Excellence have said that if caregivers removed their labour, our systems would grind to a halt by noon on the first day.
It’s that valuable, and yet we know that it’s often gendered. It is often racialized. There’s often an age component, and so some people’s labour within our systems is being valued more than others, and it’s time to really revisit that. And knowing that caregiving is a determinant of health is a way of saying relationships matter in our health, the relationship between the caregiver and the patient and the rest of the environment and other people and the care teams, it matters a lot, and I have lived experience of that as a caregiver for a child who went through complex health issues, it’s a lot easier for our current health system to understand that the child’s health happens in relationships that they must think about the family and the caregiving parents or guardians, in particular. It’s sometimes less clear when it comes to other caregiving relationships, particularly young people caring for older people or for siblings and others like that.
So we do, we really do need to expand that sense of self, to be beyond the confines of our physical bodies and to include our relationships and our communities. And one of the big ideas with social prescribing is that we will be able to actually make those visible, to map them and to see where we are under investing or over investing when it comes to health experiences, outcomes and use of health services. We can use this as a very practical and concrete tool to redistribute resources to where they’re most needed.
Liv Mendelsohn
Kate has just talked eloquently about caring for a child with additional needs. I think as we face this aging society, you know, 97 per cent of Canadians want to age at home and in community, and think that they are and that’s not going to be the reality for people if we don’t support caregivers. There is no aging in place without caregiver support. And we really need to look at where we’re investing. I think Kate is bang on there.
Misty Pratt
And you had completed the- you’ve talked a bit about this, but about the survey, Caring in Canada. What did you hear from people about specifically, social prescribing? Have you heard how this has made a difference in their lives for caregivers specifically?
Liv Mendelsohn
In the qualitative interview work that we did, we heard very clearly that isolation is crushing, and when those relationships fray, when the things that keep you going fray because of the strain of caregiving, that’s when you say, « I don’t know if I can go on. » And that’s something that 75 per cent of caregivers in Ontario have said, is, « I don’t know how I’ll go on, but I have to go on. » So social prescribing is really what people are asking for. They don’t use those words, but they’re asking for social connection. They’re asking for clear pathways for support. They’re asking, as Kate said, for recognition of, you know, what they’re spending out of pocket, and the ways in which the costs of care that are downloaded onto families for all sorts of things, incontinence supplies, nutritional supplements, so many pieces of what is necessary to keep someone well are not covered.
And so we have caregivers who are, you know, sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to pay their bills and Googling desperately in three in the morning trying to find you know, where’s the next where’s the next support as we’re facing a new plateau or a new phase of of our caregiving journey, and I’ve been there myself, and I certainly didn’t know what social prescription was when I was, you know, for instance, caring for my grandmother as a young teen, but that’s exactly what I wanted and needed. And so the fact that we know that social prescription reduces that social isolation, and in fact, doesn’t just reduce social isolation, but really enhances and strengthens those connections, means that people can get the kind of wraparound supports they’re looking for.
Misty Pratt
And you mentioned the cost, I’m just curious if so is the idea around social prescribing, then that this would be covered publicly like this wouldn’t be something that’s so if I’m if I’m giving a prescription to somebody for an art class, for example, is that a cost that’s being then borne by that person who goes to that art class?
Kate Mulligan
At the moment, we are focused on better matching up existing resources with the people who need them most. So that means people are not going to be referred to things that cost them money. We are going to keep referring people or support the idea that implementers keep referring people to free, publicly offered services, supports, often using community development to create those where they don’t already exist. So we could create a grief support group for people who are going through shared experiences.
And we know that providing leadership and service is actually a huge health booster, so those people who are able to volunteer or provide other supports to people going through similar experiences, they have huge health benefits to themselves. Now this may not be sustainable in the very long run going forward, and that’s why we want to capture and measure where the demand is and where the need is and where we will need to start thinking about better investing in services, thinking about how to connect people to small businesses and local economic development, and being willing to put new money in, seeing that the very, very probable outcome is going to be that these services are very low cost and provide very significant health services. So that’s the long term view. At the moment, though, we just focus on what’s freely available.
Liv Mendelsohn
Being able to identify what’s out there is a huge challenge for caregivers. There haven’t been clear pathways at all. Eighty-four per cent of caregivers have received no caregiving specific reports in the last year, right? So people are trying to navigate on their own. They’re googling. They’re asking friends, there hasn’t been someone that they can turn to for this holistic support. So the link worker is absolutely critical, and also isn’t just giving, like, a generic, you know, printout of here’s some you know- here’s some programs at the local library. They’re sitting and doing needs mapping and resource planning with the caregiver, with the patient, to figure out what’s going to be most helpful and what, as Kate says, what’s out there, because people don’t have access to that. It’s, I think, really surprising when you start your caregiving journey, you know, when you’re when you’re facing a new diagnosis, you think, okay, like, here’s the medical course of treatment that’s been outlined for me, and now what else? And there is nothing that really happens for you in that way. So it’s really, really critical.
Misty Pratt
And that’s a super helpful explanation, because I think I was imagining someone hands me a list of resources, and it’s up to me to call the place to try to find out. But it sounds like this, you know, it’s really you’re sitting together to work on this. And so that takes me to my next question, which was, how is this implemented? And maybe Kate, this is for you, like, how, in here in Ontario, does this work? And what exactly does the link worker do?
Kate Mulligan
Social prescribing looks different in different contexts, and that’s a good thing. We want it to be able to be locally specific, flexible and adaptable. But as I mentioned, there are a few key components, like being identified as having a social need, but also as having social gifts and things to offer. All of us, no matter what our abilities and capabilities are, whatever our identities are our circumstances are, we all have something to offer. And so we really want to take that strengths based approach, where we look at people as whole people in their whole relationships with something to give, not just as recipients of services or people with deficits. So even just that, mindset change is a really important component of social prescribing.
In practice here in Ontario, it looks like a few different things. So it’s been happening in community health centers and related comprehensive primary health care organizations since at least 2018 when we did a big pilot project in 11 CHCs with really diverse geographies and populations and needs and strengths, and we saw that it really had a significant impact. That clinicians felt that they were being better supported, people were coming in less often for non clinical things, loneliness was reduced by 49 per cent for self reported loneliness, and lots and lots of other good outcomes were happening. That’s one of the examples in primary health care. It’s also happening in hospitals.
So St. Mike’s hospital academic family health team does social prescribing that involves outreach to people in their homes and communities, and they even have Canada’s first two Indigenous social prescribing link workers to do culturally safe, culturally appropriate social prescribing in Indigenous ways for Indigenous populations. But it’s happening in many other places too. It’s happening in rehab settings. It’s happening on campuses where we know there is a huge student youth mental health crisis happening despite the fact that campuses have a lot of the right kinds of things to offer. It’s happening in paramedicine, where community paramedics are able to do social prescribing, and it’s even happening at the library. The Toronto Public Library got its biggest ever philanthropic gift to do social prescribing for older adults, to build their social connection and to build local community resilience. So really, it can happen anywhere by anyone, as long as they’re, you know, trying to improve somebody’s health through these non clinical approaches that really center strengths and relationships in that local way.
Liv Mendelsohn
Maybe I’ll give you an example of what it can look like from a caregiver perspective. So I’ll give you the example of a caregiver who was really at the end of his rope. He wasn’t sleeping. He was exhausted. He was facing a lot of guilt. He didn’t think he was caring as well as he could, and he was becoming disconnected from his children while caring for his spouse and sitting down with someone and identifying what would help him refuel, keep going and be able to better regulate was was everything to him. A really simple plan emerged. What he needed was two hours a week where someone would take care of his wife, serve her meal, take her out of the house so he could play piano for an hour, take a shower and have a rest. And that was the difference maker in his being able to keep caring and his wife being able to stay at home.
Misty Pratt
I also was thinking of that, you know, this happens often, too, on an informal level, like what’s happening, you know, in clinics and in hospitals. But I, you know, I’m thinking of friends who have needed support, and we’ve kind of rallied around and gathered all the resources and looked for the programs and looked for what they needed, and done that. So I think some of this must be happening too, kind of like an undercurrent of all of the more formal.
Liv Mendelsohn
Absolutely.
Kate Mulligan
It’s absolutely happening in that informal and ad hoc ways and under other names. But what’s not happening is making it a core part of our system, making it a requirement for everyone, and that means it’s inequitable, so people who do have access to those strong villages, you know, they probably need social prescribing less to begin with, and they’re able to access what they need without support. And you know, there will be some people for whom social prescribing is just a piece of paper referral because they already have most of the things in place. But for many of us, that’s just not the case, and again, particularly when we are struggling, and that can be anyone at any time, but often it’s people who are already facing discrimination or marginalization or other challenges. And so, yeah, it is really important to make it a normal, systematic, routine part of the system.
Liv Mendelsohn
Not everybody has a robust network, and even when you do when the average time people are caring is four and a half years plus, you know, it’s hard, even for the best village and the best network to sustain that care without systemic support and without supports that aren’t dependent on those individual friends, right, and that those individual family members. So if we want to nurture those informal networks that actually make up our communities. We need to invest in them, and we need to be able to support them. And that is where social prescription is I think the best way to do so.
Misty Pratt
How do we expand the movement? How do we formalize it more within the system?
Kate Mulligan
There are a number of different things we can do. One is to keep encouraging people locally to take their next step, whatever that is. So I spend a lot of my time talking with people who are interested in social prescribing, and reminding them to give themselves permission to just get started. It can be that simple that you decide together that there are a couple of people who are real champions for this, who want to get started with, you know, maybe one health care practice and one community organization who want to get together and build their strength, build their relationships. You see this with Ontario Health Teams, where many different health organizations and social care organizations are expected to get together and have those linking conversations. Social prescribing can be a tool for them to actually build a relationship beyond kind of having some shared goals or something. It’s very concrete. It’s something they can do right away, and so the more we build tools and structures for them to use, the easier it will be.
Often we hear that clinicians don’t want to ask questions about social determinants of health because they don’t know what they’re going to do with the answers, and that can cause real moral injury to them and to distress for their patients when that gap becomes really evident. Between what’s needed and what’s available. So we want to make sure that they can take action and that they feel confident in doing that. So those kinds of tools and supports and that locally generated work is probably the most important, and that’s partly because we need co-production, where people, caregivers, implementers, policymakers, funders, they all come together to work together, to design what it’s going to be, to make sure it’s working well, and to follow up and evaluate, to see how we’re doing and to make changes. And that also means that co production of the person with their health care provider or link worker about what they’re going to do. So we can’t impose co-production from the top down and expect it to work everywhere well. We really see this in the UK, where social prescribing is more widespread across their system, that places that were ready for it are thriving with it, and places that weren’t are struggling with it. So we do want to support that grassroots, sort of bottom up, locally specific work.
At the same time, there are some policy barriers that we can break down to make that easier for people to get started. So we can do things like this, technical standards for accreditation. We can adapt the Canada Health Act to make sure that social supports and services and social prescribing are considered reimbursable health services. We can do that at the provincial level, under our current existing health insurance plans. Some of those bigger pieces can happen too, and of course, we can invest. So one thing that I’ve been talking about at the federal level is matching Mark Carney’s big physical infrastructure funding with social infrastructure funding.
We can’t just build more bridges and power plants and mines if the people who work there can’t get by and can’t thrive in their daily communities and in their daily lives. So we need to think about social infrastructure as just as important and just as valuable as this physical infrastructure. And again, social prescribing can surface where that labour, where that contribution is already happening, but being ignored. So those are a few of the things that we can do to make the policy changes necessary and the investment changes necessary to enable people to do that, locally generated social prescribing in a good way.
Misty Pratt
As part of that, what should ICES be doing? Because to go back to what you mentioned about reimbursement, are we able to collect data on this? Is there a billing code for social prescribing?
Kate Mulligan
We are able to collect data, but there is not a specific billing code for social prescribing. That is the kind of thing that we need to look into going forward, although I should say that in terms of practice, we often hear that physicians in particular will not be interested in this kind of work unless there is a billing code, but our experience is that that’s not the case. This makes their lives easier. It reduces their workload, because it helps them focus more on the clinical work that they’re trained for, and refer patients with social needs and non clinical needs elsewhere. And it also helps with their sense of purpose that they are able to help meet these social needs. They care about people. That’s why they got into health and medicine. They want to help. And that just even being part of the referral pathway makes people feel that sense of purpose. It improves their teamwork. It has so many knock on effects that help with healthcare, workforce retention and wellbeing, which is a core component of that quintuple aim, right that that care team well being is in there. So those are all factors that help us with implementation anyway.
Liv Mendelsohn
And we’ve talked to a lot of physicians and primary care practitioners who are really excited about this because they feel they’re so overextended and there is a lot of distress when you know they see a patient and a caregiver struggling, and they’re not sure what what to do or what they have time to do, given the strain on their their work day and their practice, and there can really be moral distress with that too. So knowing where the pathways are and knowing that there’s this whole social care system that they can partner with is a huge relief to many physicians and practitioners.
Kate Mulligan
Getting back to the data and what ICES can do. There are a few things that really matter. One is that as we do start to record social prescribing activities and pathways in electronic health records, that we start to link those to other administrative data sets, because what we want to do is to see what happens when people do experience a social prescription, what happens to their long term outcomes, what happens to our collective use of emergency rooms, hospital beds and so on. We have done some excellent modeling through the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing with KPMG that shows a $4.43 return on investment for every dollar invested in social prescribing, and that includes both reduced health care costs and improved social and economic participation- people getting back out into the community, into the workforce. And so those kinds of things, those kinds of analyzes, are going to become increasingly important. That’s based on modeling.
What we will need from ICES is actually tracking what what’s happening in practice to see if you know what’s what’s worked in other countries and in other places works the same way here. And we’ve mapped it out patient pathways for older adults and for young people experiencing mental health challenges, and seen very big returns on investment there too, and we have all kinds of really good data showing, for example, even simple things like falls prevention that can happen by getting people more engaged. Things like making sure young people get into the workforce and don’t spend a lot of their early years out of it and struggle for the rest of their lives. Things like that can provide huge benefits. And so we do need to be able to make those linkages and make those linkages across social and healthcare databases. Now that’s one of the biggest challenges.
Okay, so researchers out there, I need your help with this one. How do we solve what they sometimes call the wrong pocket problem that the funding for social prescribing, activities, social services, community supports, libraries and so on, may come from one ministry, the Ministry of Community and Social Services, for example, but the benefits might accrue to another ministry, the Ministry of Health and all these reduced costs. How do we do a better job of well being budgeting that addresses that problem, so that we have shared investment in the inputs and in the benefits the outcomes for social prescribing, I think we won’t fully, fully get to where we need to be until siloed funding teams within government can really have a sense of shared purpose and shared outcomes.
Liv Mendelsohn
that is in line with what has been set out as a whole of government approach to health and well being, it really is in line. We also think there’s a role for investment from philanthropy. We’re a program of the Azraeli Foundation, and we have put our money where our mouth is, because we want to gather the kind of evidence and create the kind of systems that Kate is talking about, so that government knows what the benefits are, so that that’s clear, and there’s an opportunity to invest. So we’ve invested in social prescription for caregivers across four provinces, soon to be six, and a robust community of practice, and we are very excited about the data coming out and our ability to partner with government to make this again part of our regular health care system.
Kate Mulligan
Every province, every country, every jurisdiction, every health system likes to have a made in my own place example to really learn about how this works well. Happily, that coincides well with how we think social prescribing should happen anyway. But yeah, we really do need to invest in those context specific ones.
Governments tend to be more cautious. So I agree with Liv that people who are able to make investments that help demonstrate the value to government are really needed right now. So those with higher risk tolerance, those with capital ready to share, you know, those who are interested in innovation from the public and private sectors who can advance this. So for example, we sometimes see private investment in the US on arts and health. So you know where there are places for your local theater company, your local pottery studio, right? So private doesn’t necessarily have to mean major corporate. It means everyday small businesses in your community who have something to offer and you want to support as part of a resilient local, community based approach. So there is a range of actors here, and most of us play more than one of those roles. We are patients. Sometimes we work in the health system. Some of us work in that private sector or in government. Many of us are caregiving at the same time, right? We play many of these roles, and so thinking of our lives as citizens, right?
Small ‘c’ citizens, that’s the shift we really need to see in healthcare, that we all have something to offer, and we all have needs, and we need to just think better about how we distribute those and how we think relationally across our different identities and roles over time and space in our local environments.
Misty Pratt
And that’s a wonderful segue into my last question, which I was going to ask you about the future of social prescribing, which you can touch on too. But what I’d love to know is, okay, if I’m listening to this right now and I’m a person who thinks, « wow, yes, this is exactly what we need and what I want » what’s that next step I should take right now?
Kate Mulligan
So it depends on who you are. If you see yourself as a patient or caregiver, talk to somebody you’re involved with as part of your healthcare or social care team and ask for it. We need to demonstrate the demand. So that’s part of it. And then maybe there will be something available, and maybe there’s something ad hoc that can be done to help support you. You can also reach out to organizations. And Liv wants to jump in on that.
Liv Mendelsohn
I want to jump in just to share. Our partners at the Ontario Caregiving Organization are ready to help you. If you’re hearing this and you’re thinking, « this would really help me in my health journey and my caregiving journey, » you can reach out to the OCO. They have a hotline, and you can access social prescription. Kate, over to you for the other roles.
Kate Mulligan
Yeah, I think that one is really important, that there are pathways for you, and there are increasingly pathways through disease specific organizations. So Lupus Canada, for example, is really becoming more interested in social prescribing. There’s a new work on social prescribing for people with Parkinson’s and doing dance, for example. Some of these have really, really long traditions of deep clinical evidence supporting what they’re doing as well. So if you’re a patient or caregiver, try reaching out to a related organization or to somebody who’s in your orbit, with respect to your care teams.
If you’re a healthcare provider or implementer or manager, think about how you could start on this now. Is there a small prompt you could put into your electronic health record to remind clinicians to ask about these things? Is there a person on your team who could be repurposed to serve as a link worker, or to train local people to be additional link workers. So really, just be creative about what’s available, what’s important to you, what’s going on in your community. We have great examples of black focused social prescribing in community health centers that really rely on leadership in the community to connect people to black leaders, black cultural services, Afrocentric principles and healthcare and so on. So really think about what’s strong and what’s necessary in your community, and start there. We always say, « start with what’s strong over what’s wrong. » So get your champions do something.
If you’re operating at that policy or funding level, reach out to the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing, or the Canadian Center for Caregiving Excellence, or others that you see taking leadership in this space. We know, we know what’s needed to make this happen, and it’s probably easier than you think, less expensive and really easy to get started. And so again, we just want people to do that minimum viable product, that first step, because the feedback you get in the process of social prescribing will give you guidance. The data you get will give you guidance about where you need to improve, or where you need to invest, or what you need to change. But the other the qualitative feedback, the relationships, the stories, the sense of purpose and meaning in your own life, the feeling of belonging you create in the team, those parts of feedback will be, I guarantee, what keeps you coming back for more, it’s absolutely what drives me and keeps me thriving in this work, is those relationships and the stories about them. It is really, meaningful, really important, and in a time when a lot of things feel hard, that’s a really nice thing to be able to say about the work we do,
Misty Pratt
I was just gonna say right now, especially when it’s things feel difficult in our world, and I think a lot of people feel lonely and feel disconnected. And so it sounds like this can offer you, even in not receiving that yourself, but in being part of the movement and moving it forward. So thank you so much. Thanks for joining me for this episode of In Our VoICES, check out the show notes for links to research and any other information that we’ve referenced in this episode. A reminder that the opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of ICES. Please be sure to follow and rate us on your favorite podcast app. If you have feedback or questions about anything you’ve heard on in our voices, please email us at [email protected] and we will get back to you all of us at ICES wish you strong data and good health.
