Practice
Guidance index
Everything the Institute has published for practitioners. 220 documents, most recent first.
2026
What Funders Are Actually Buying: Service Delivery or Community Membership
A funding decision that looks like one choice is often two: pay for a service with defined outputs, or pay for a community with none. Confusing them is what breaks programmes at renewal.
Building a Referral Pathway That Survives Contact With Demand
A sequenced approach to setting up health-to-community referral partnerships for social connection, built around the point most pilots miss: the community organisation's capacity.
Safeguarding When the Referral Is to a Coffee Morning, Not a Clinic
Informal social prescribing sends isolated people into unsupervised community settings with volunteers, not clinicians. Here is what a safeguarding structure for that actually needs to cover.
Running a Loneliness Group by Phone, Video, or in Person: What the Trial Evidence Actually Supports
A look at how structured remote delivery has outperformed in-person befriending in the strongest available trials, and what that does and does not mean for a social prescribing service choosing a modality.
Recruiting and Keeping Volunteer Befrienders in Social Prescribing
The evidence on volunteer befriending is thinner and less favourable to informal models than most programme managers assume. Here is what that should change about recruitment, training, and role design.
Should You Refer Anyone to a Consumer Connection App?
Buffet, Timeleft, 222, Pie, Meetup, Eventbrite, Luma and Partiful get recommended to isolated clients as if they were one thing. They are four different things. A decision framework for link workers, and the four cases where referring is defensible.
The Venue Decisions That Determine Who Actually Shows Up
Room layout, parking, signage, and start time quietly decide attendance for community and social prescribing programmes. A checklist for the logistics that get treated as afterthoughts.
The Cost Case for Social Connection Programmes, Built Honestly
How to build a funding case for a social prescribing or connection programme without borrowing a mortality statistic to answer a service-use question.
Why Aged-Care Befriending Models Don't Transfer Cleanly to the Workplace
Employers borrowing peer-buddy and befriending schemes from older-adult loneliness research should check the mechanism before the format. What worked in aged care was recently outperformed by a more structured approach in its own population.
What a Frontline Training Line Item Should Specify
A funding decision, not just a script: what a commissioner or programme manager should require frontline staff be taught to say about loneliness, and what the training budget needs to explicitly rule out.
Who Owns the Referral After You Make It
A practice note on the operational failure point in health-and-community partnerships for loneliness: what happens after the referral, and who is accountable for it.
Evaluating Groups With Roles Versus Groups Without Them
When a group programme assigns members defined roles rather than just facilitating contact, the outcomes look different. A guide to what to measure and what to tell a funder.
The Capability Gap: Training Staff for Asks the Evidence Can't Support
A framework for training staff to handle requests — from commissioners, boards, or their own enthusiasm — for outcomes the connection evidence base cannot actually promise.
When to Stop Running a Social Connection Activity
A new study on social media and loneliness is a reminder that feeling connected and being less lonely are not the same outcome. Here is how to decide whether a group, activity, or referral pathway has earned its place on the caseload.
Why Matched Befriending Schemes Plateau Around Week Six
Most social prescribing referrals for loneliness end in a one-to-one befriending match. The evidence on why these schemes underperform structured alternatives is now specific enough to change how you design one.
Are You Evaluating a Service or a Community? Pick One
Programmes that deliver a service and programmes that build a community succeed on different metrics. Using the wrong one is why funders see decline where members see health.
Match the Intervention to the Problem, Not the Referral Category
Befriending, volunteering, and structured group activity solve different problems. Before commissioning any of them, work out whether you're dealing with isolation or loneliness — they are not the same thing.
How to Write a Funding Case a Commissioner Can Actually Use
A sequenced procedure for translating a social connection programme into the outcome language commissioners are already accountable for, with the evidence that supports each claim and what to leave out.
Scaling a Workplace Connection Programme Without Killing It
The features that made a small workplace connection pilot work are usually the first things cut when it goes company-wide. A practical checklist for what to protect.
Reach Is Not a Warm-Up Act for Outcomes
Programme managers under pressure to show outcomes often skip the reach data that would tell them whether those outcomes mean anything. Both numbers answer different questions, and neither substitutes for the other.
Report the Dropout, Not Just the Completers
Most social prescribing reports quietly measure outcomes only for people who finished the programme. That one choice can turn a mediocre service into a glowing one on paper — here is how to stop doing it.
Designing the Referral Handoff So People Actually Show Up
Most social prescribing pathways lose people at the point of handoff, not at referral. A practical framework for designing the transition between clinician, link worker, and community activity.
Employee Connection Programmes: What Happens in the First Four Weeks
New hires are most open to forming workplace ties in their first month and least likely to be offered anything structured. A look at how sequencing, not just programme design, determines whether workplace connection efforts hold.
How to Design a Loneliness Programme Evaluation You Can Actually Run
A sequenced approach to evaluation design for social connection programmes, built around what a small team can realistically measure — not what a systematic review would prefer.