Crawley Borough Council

Overall purpose: to keep people living well in their homes and communities.

District and Borough Councils in West Sussex offer a social prescribing service for local people via seven Wellbeing hubs. These provide referrals and signposting into local non-clinical services as well as ongoing support for individuals.

The Wellbeing hubs accept self-referrals as well as referrals from professionals. Each hub has its own process for referrals, some using online forms, others using email. Most don’t differentiate between self and professional referrals, meaning forms are written for only one audience.

To make sure all who need them receive our services we need the process for professional referrals into the wellbeing hubs to be as easy as possible. These are busy people. Recent work around Dementia support in Crawley has identified over 30 referring organisations for this condition alone.

We want to:

• Identify who the referrers are and engage with them.
• Clarify what the barriers are to making referrals.
• Explore how we could use technology to standardise and improve the referral process, so that it is quick, easy, secure and consistent.
• Find out what updates professionals want after they refer people to us and the format of those updates.
• Produce a map of the future process and solution options.