The Life Rooms were awarded 'Best use of digital for NHS Trusts' alongside Access Health Support and Care at the recent Health Tech Newspaper (HTN) Health Tech Awards, for our work in integrating the RiO EPR system used by Mersey Care clinicians with a social prescribing tool, Elemental, allowing mental health professionals to refer service users directly to The Life Rooms for social prescribing support.
This innovative project was a first for NHS Trusts, where we launched interoperability between clinical teams and social prescribers, allowing clinicans to quickly and easily refer their service users to Pathways Advisors at The Life Rooms for support with their social needs, such as housing, finances, employment, and more.
This interoperability allowed clinicans to focus more of their time on clinical interventions, while feeling confident that the social needs of their service users were still being addressed by The Life Rooms in a safe and well-governed way, and together providing wrap-around support for people in our communities. Through this project, we were able to demonstrate some fantastic results:
- the amount of time clinicians spent supporting service users with social needs like housing, financial concerns, and social isolation, reduced significantly once interoperability with The Life Rooms was introduced,
- 97.2% of clinicians surveyed felt confident in meeting the social needs of their service users by referring them to The Life Rooms,
- 92.6% of service users surveyed felt that the support they received had a positive effect on their mental wellbeing (levels of anxiety, low mood, stress,
- 85.1% of service users surveyed felt that the support they received had a positive effect on their social and practical circumstances (finance, housing etc).
Congratulations to all of The Life Rooms team involved in this project, Access Health Support and Care, and Mersey Care's clinical teams who we worked alongside. Thank you to HTN for recognising the innovation and impact of this work.