Title: Social Prescribing For All (SP4ALL): Increasing diversity in cultural and natural social prescribing programmes through shared training.
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council

Abstract: Given the much worse life expectancy and overall health reported in people from ethnic minority groups (PHE, 2017), there is a need to develop strategies for inclusivity to mitigate the health inequalities experienced by people from ethnic minority groups. Social prescribing provides a means to address these inequalities inexpensively, which benefit the NHS (e.g., in terms of Accident and Emergency and outpatient visits) with few side-effects, but only if these inequalities are challenged and not simply reinforced. However, in England people from ethnic minority groups are severely underrepresented in creative and nature-based social prescribing (SP) programmes both as providers and recipients. This proposal's main objective concerns creating practitioner training for people from ethnic minority groups and cultural competence training for practitioners to learn together by building on existing SP networks and therapeutic training with our partners. We will pilot a training model (based on co-mentorship approaches) to support people from ethnic minority groups as champions of their own cultural knowledge and co-facilitators alongside practitioners with therapeutic training. First, through our partners and collaborators, we will recruit willing individuals from diverse backgrounds, experienced practitioners and organisations. Two participants (cultural champions) will work with one mentor, an experienced practitioner after taking part in a therapeutic training programme and tailored cultural competency training. The training will also include creative activities stemming from participants' cultures, which can help break down barriers, and increase enjoyment. Upon completion of these two training programmes, we will use a survey to assess participants' satisfaction and competency. Second, mentors and two cultural champions will work together to co-develop and co-deliver a 10-week asset-based programme in collaboration with a local community organisation. Working with the research team, they will develop a working framework, identifying therapeutic goals, ways to address them using asset-based approaches with a focus on inclusivity. The framework will also include cultural champions' roles: how they will utilise both therapeutic communication skills and cultural competency when engaging with participants to promote their health and wellbeing. At the end of 10-week programme, we will conduct three focus groups with cultural champions, their mentors and participants to gain a deeper understanding of how the co-mentorship-based training worked. Additionally, with the participants, we will utilise a validated questionnaire to assess the changes in personal, interpersonal and social wellbeing. Using the recordings of the Action Research sessions, the research team will identify key elements of the training. Combined with the focus group discussions data from both mentees and mentors, the research team will refine the framework and produce a draft training handbook, which will be used to scale-up the intervention after a refinement process. Finally, we will present the training handbook to a panel, which consists of cultural champions, their mentors, representatives from community organisations, National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP), SP networks and the Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise sector. Through discussions and decision-focused meetings, we will define and refine priorities. These meetings will be used to refine the training handbook, which can be adopted by other practitioners and organisation across the UK. Working with our partners and collaborators, we will also produce policy recommendations for SP networks through the NASP in relation to inclusive asset-based creative approaches. These findings and explanation of the handbook will be disseminated via a free virtual conference to enable scaling-up of this intervention


Research activity codes: 7.3 MANAGEMENT AND DECISION MAKING
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE