Social Prescribing for Young People in the West Midlands: The Potential Impact on Employment and the Economy

This project aims to consider the need for, benefits of, and potential barriers to, accessing social prescribing interventions for young people in the West Midlands, with particular focus on its impact on employability and local economy.

Research undertaken as part of a 15-month collaboration between the Institute of Community Research and Development (ICRD) at the University of Wolverhampton and the West Midlands Regional Economic Development Institute (WMREDI) sought to examine the need for, and benefits of, social prescribing provision for young people in the West Midlands and its economic and employability impact.

This multidisciplinary research project built on ICRD’s previous work with community social prescribing providers. In particular, previous research undertaken by ICRD identified, in relation to the economic and employment focus of this investigation, that while many referrals to social prescribing services in the Black Country were related to mental health needs, often accompanying issues around debt, housing, and other financial issues were raised – highlighting the need for link workers, referring agencies, and individuals, to understand the link between mental health needs and other more social or economic issues.

Working with existing partners in the West Midlands, the current project commenced with a review of existing evidence (published in our research digest), followed by a survey of providers in the West Midlands (see blog for key findings) and culminated in the production of an evaluation framework for commissioners and providers to measure the impact of social prescribing for young people.

We invite commissioners and providers of social prescribing for young people to implement our evaluation framework; and for researchers to test and refine our evaluation framework. We ask everyone utilising the findings of this report to connect with the research team at ICRD via socialprescribing@wlv.ac.uk and share their experiences.

WMREDI

Research Theme 5

Regional Society and Communities

Objectives

This multidisciplinary research project draws together and builds on ICRD’s recent work with community social prescribing providers (Massie et al., 2019) and with children and young people (Massie et al., 2015; 2018; 2019) to ensure the development of a new frontier of social prescribing is evidence-based from its inception to meet the needs of children and young people. Working with our existing partners in the West Midlands, the project involves a review of existing evidence and – given the lack of practice and research in this area – draws on evidence from allied fields. New data will be collected to understand local needs and context and to ensure the design meets their needs in a realistic and practical way.

The project will be output focused and will both consider current policy and regional data sources, and feed in the findings from new evidence, in order to explore youth social prescribing interventions in the region and develop a novel framework for evaluation measures to capture how such work has an impact on the employability and economic status of service users.  Through engaging with regional service providers and referring organisations, their voices will directly feed into policy briefings at the culmination of the project.

WMREDI is funded by Research England and the WMREDI partnership