The Life Rooms were awarded at the national Positive Practice in Mental Health Awards on Wednesday 1 May, winning in the Innovation in Community Mental Health category for our work in the Mid-Mersey region. This project saw us launch interoperability between clinical teams and social prescribers, as the first NHS Trust to introduce this innovate way of working which allows 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 by 70% 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 HSC, and Mersey Care's clinical teams who we worked alongside. Thank you to the Positive Practice Awards for recognising the innovation and impact of this work.
The Life Rooms were also highly commended for the Mid-Mersey interoperability project in the Quality Improvement and/or Service Transformation category, and highly commended for our micro-commissioning of VCSFE organisations in the System Wide Commissioning category for our work in connecting and supporting local communities. You can keep up to date with our partners on site at The Life Rooms here.