Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames

The Connected Kingston project has started to embed social prescribing in the borough by training people in the voluntary sector, council and other statutory services. The training is both about skills and behaviours to try to challenge the culture of just being solely focussed on their own role or service. Linked to the training we have developed a new open-source tool to aid the signposting based around the OpenReferral standard.

We’d like to test how we can package the whole service for re-use (including training materials, approaches for engaging with the borough and the products) with Sutton. We’d also like to test/iterate in other areas such as:

• with GPs and explore integration options with their systems to see if this will increase uptake
• explore opportunity of using OpenReferral and linking with the NHS Choices social care beta where they’ve identified the lack of a data standard for local services as a problem
• explore other opportunities to reuse data via other platforms such as smart home and social media
• embed intervention points such as council forms to create nudge points (e.g. when paying council tax a curated list of different services could be offered such as NHS Couch to 5k)
• Enhance data collation to better understand local service needs (for better Asset Based Community Development)
• Explore pharmacy based integration through trialing customer access points within pharmacies

Discovery evidence

Kingston ran a research project (called Better Lives) mapping residents journeys from normality through to a crisis. This emphasised that a resident’s downward spiral would usually touch many different services across the borough, however, their journey was often fragmented and intervention points were missed due to the specific focus of the services being engaged. When residents interacted with these services the front-line staff often had low knowledge of or training in how to both recognise and signpost to more beneficial services or activities from either public sector, voluntary sector or communities.

It was also felt there was an opportunity to support communities and help them to better support one-another which also has the potential to reduce demand on both council and voluntary sector services.

Better Lives research: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LDPDG8CGutEx4uj81uXVGE9mh-EKeJ4d?usp=sharing

Galileo Charts: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-7ZzRJpkx6YTEUyQm5HSmU5amM

Other reading: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qd9vRLyQX0QSMsWM0eQ2ip1TB7UeF9CP/view?usp=sharing