In this spotlight we take a look at the work of Edberts House – a charity with four community houses in areas of Gateshead experiencing challenges where residents want to make their communities better places to live. Each of their houses provides facilities and activities that support residents and enrich community life, with projects developed, planned and run by local people. We look at their work as a social prescribing link worker host organisation and we look in detail at their personalised care tool – HAY – and hear how it helps them track residents’ wellbeing over time.
Edberts House have a large social prescribing team based across twenty-three surgeries in Gateshead Primary Care and also working in Palliative Care at Gateshead’s Queen Elizabeth (QE) Hospital. They offer a wide range of social prescribing support and also have a specialist Children, Young People and Families team that provides bespoke support to families living in East Gateshead. Additionally, they have specialist link workers focused on breaking down the barriers to employment across Gateshead and run a number of proactive social prescribing initiatives focused on tackling health inequalities and offering peer support. This year they will be partnering with midwifery services at the QE Hospital to offer specialist support to pregnant people in Gateshead.
Since January 2024 Edberts House have been tracking the wellbeing of those referred to their social prescribing team with the HAY (How Are You) tool. It’s a personalised care tool developed by Edberts House which helps patients to focus on the areas that impact their health and wellbeing. The interface is designed to be simple and accessible, with icons representing different social determinants of health. People are asked to look back at the last two weeks and consider how they felt about areas such as money, housing and emotional wellbeing, with responses scaled by ‘bothering’ factors, starting from ‘this never bothered me’ to ‘this bothered me every day’. The tool is used at the initial meeting with patients and at periodic and final reviews. HAY is a goal setting tool and helps link workers prioritise support, whilst enabling patients and link workers to review progress and assess the impact of engagement with social prescribing support on health and wellbeing.
Edberts House have been working with independent partner Darren Flynn, Professor of Applied Health and Social Care Research, and Practitioner Health Psychologist, at Northumbria University to prove the statistical validity of the tool. He says:
“HAY is an innovative multi-use tool, developed by experts at Edberts House with extensive experience of supporting people with a range of different, and often complex psychosocial needs. It uses accessible language and graphics to represent seven domains of psychosocial issues, which are critically important for mental well-being and other aspects of health-related quality of life. The HAY can be used by practitioners to help people focus on what matters most to them and as a tool to measure the impact of the fantastic projects delivered by staff at Edberts House.”
HAY lets professionals view the Average Bothering Factor (ABF) across individual people’s responses and across wider groups of responders. The data gathered between July 2024 to date shows that people who work with Edberts House’s social prescribers experience a reduction in ABF across all of the areas they’ve been asked to consider. Among those who used HAY, emotional wellbeing has the highest ABF in the initial evaluation (3.9) and also has the biggest reduction in ABF (2.9) – a shift from ‘this often bothers me’ to ‘it bothers me some of the time.’
Looking ahead to how the charity can progress their work with HAY, Edberts House have been granted funding to transform their current manual HAY paper process into a digitised platform, where data and records will be securely housed in a microsite. This will greatly increase the efficiency of the tool, better utilise staff time and make it much easier to analyse the data. Users and patients have participated in co-design workshops and the prototype should be ready for testing by the end of March 2025. Further to that, Edberts House is working in partnership with Adult Social Care to pilot East Gateshead Connects, which aims to put people at the heart of their own care. The HAY tool will be used by both Edberts House staff and Adult Social Care to assess the outcome of the work.
VONNE has enabled investment, as part of our Healthy Communities and Social Prescribing Infrastructure Investment Programme, into Edberts House to support the development of its social prescribing offer. This programme is funded by the North East and North Cumbria ICB as part of their Healthier and Fairer workstream. The funding has given Edberts House the chance to expand its social prescribing offer, including leading on the Integrated Neighbourhood Teams work in the East of Gateshead, bringing different professionals together to better support local people.
You can find out more about the work of Edberts House here and you can hear from one of Edberts House’s social prescribing link workers here – Deborah tells her story, explaining her role as part of the Mile in My Shoes project.
If you would like to know more about VONNE’s Healthy Communities and Social Prescribing programme you can access the webpage here and join the Healthy Communities and Social Prescribing Network to receive regular news and information.