Practice
Guidance index
Everything the Institute has published for practitioners. 219documents, most recent first.
2024
Training the Handoff Between Clinics and Community Groups
A practice note on what to train for when health services and community organisations start referring to each other, and where most partnerships lose people at the join.
Building a Cost Case for Social Prescribing Without Overselling It
A practical guide to making the financial case for social prescribing to commissioners and funders, without claiming savings the evidence cannot support.
Funding by Mechanism, Not by Symptom
Loneliness funding often targets a diagnosis rather than a cause. A look at how commissioners have sorted interventions by the specific deficit they address, and what that means for procurement decisions.
How Social Prescribing Schemes Actually Evaluate What They Do
Drawing on published reviews of social prescribing evaluation, a look at what a workable evaluation design looks like when you don't have a research budget or a control group.
Social Prescribing: What to Sequence in the First Four Weeks
A practice note for social prescribing link workers and commissioners on ordering the first month of a referral, so structure and purpose come before contact for its own sake.
Recruiting and Keeping Volunteers for Connection Programmes
Most volunteer attrition in social connection programmes happens for predictable, fixable reasons. A practice note on recruitment, training scope, and the supervision structure that keeps people past month three.
Before You Evaluate a Connection Programme, Audit Its Logistics
Attendance data from workplace connection programmes is usually a logistics signal, not an engagement signal. Here is how to separate the two before you report results to a funder or a leadership team.
Before You Port a Programme to a New Population, Check This
A practice note on adapting a connection programme built for one group to another — what actually needs to change, and the failure mode when it doesn't.
Fund the Role, Not the Founder
A practical guide to structuring roles inside a funded peer group or social prescribing activity, so it survives the departure of whoever started it.
Safeguarding in Social Prescribing: A Procedure, Not an Afterthought
A step-by-step approach to building safeguarding into informal social prescribing activities, without turning warm community spaces into clinical checkpoints.
Who Holds the Relationship When a GP Refers to a Community Group
Social prescribing pathways fail when health services control referral volume but community organisations carry the delivery risk. A practical structure for the partnership, and the failure mode to name before it happens.
Why Reach Numbers and Outcome Numbers Answer Different Questions
A social prescribing programme can hit its referral targets and still fail the people who need it most. What tracking reach alongside outcomes actually reveals, and why one without the other misleads funders.
Why Your Connection Programme Only Reaches the Already-Connected
Workplace social connection programmes tend to recruit the people who need them least. Here is how to change who signs up, not just how many.
What the KFF Survey Means for Deciding When to End a Group
KFF's new breakdown of loneliness by race and discrimination reframes a question most social prescribing programmes avoid: when is stopping a group the right call, not a failure of retention?
Attendance Falls at Session Two, Not Week Four
The most common attrition point in a new connection group is earlier than programme teams expect. Here's what typically happens between the first and second session, and how to redesign around it.
Digital or In-Person: How to Cost and Choose a Group Format
A funding decision, not a preference. How to work out whether a digital group, an in-person group, or a hybrid model is the better use of a fixed budget, and what the evidence actually supports.
Building a Cost Case for Connection Training That Survives Scrutiny
A practice note on how to justify training budgets for social prescribing and connection-focused staff without borrowing mortality statistics that don't belong to the intervention you're actually running.
What to Fix and What to Flex When You Scale a Connection Programme
A group that works at one site is about to be commissioned across thirty. Guidance on writing a fidelity specification before the contract does it for you, and the funding mechanic that quietly destroys dose.
Measuring the Handoff: Where Referral Pathways Actually Fail
A guide to evaluating social prescribing and community referral pathways by tracking the handoff points, not just the endpoint outcomes.
Picking Loneliness Metrics a Commissioner Will Actually Fund
A practical guide for workplace programme leads on which loneliness and connection measures hold up under commissioner scrutiny, and which ones invite a budget cut.
When the Mortality Stats Don't Cover Your Training Programme
A guide for programme managers asked to justify staff training in social connection using population-level mortality evidence it was never designed to support.
Five Structural Tests for Whether You Built a Service or a Community
A service delivers an activity to people who arrive as recipients. A community is a set of relationships among the people who arrive. Five tests to work out which one you have, and what each costs to run.
How to Report Attrition Without Hiding What It Means
A practice note on reporting programme dropout honestly: what to disclose, how to frame it for funders, and the specific phrasing that tends to conceal rather than explain.
Writing a Connection Programme Bid Commissioners Will Actually Fund
Commissioners do not fund loneliness reduction. They fund service use, cost avoidance, and outcomes that fit their frameworks. A guide to translating the evidence accordingly.