Practice
Guidance index
Everything the Institute has published for practitioners. 219documents, most recent first.
2023
Health and Community Cannot Just Refer to Each Other
A framework for building genuine partnership between health services and community organisations on social connection, rather than a one-way referral pipe that quietly breaks.
Writing Your Outcomes Case in the Commissioner's Language, Not Yours
Commissioners fund risk reduction and service use, not warm feelings. A practical guide to translating social connection outcomes into the terms a funding panel actually scores.
Digital or In-Person: Choosing the Format for a Social Prescribing Group
Social prescribing services default to whichever group format is easiest to schedule. A look at what the published evidence says about digital versus in-person delivery, and how to decide.
2022
Building a Cost Case for Workplace Connection Without Overselling It
A practice note on how to justify budget for workplace loneliness programmes honestly — using the absence data you actually have, not mortality statistics that were never designed to answer a business question.
How to Turn a Service Into a Community
A weekly group that runs on schedule is not the same as a community. A sequenced procedure for building peer ties instead of just delivering sessions.
Measuring Whether Group Roles Actually Reduce Isolation
A guide to evaluating structure inside group programmes — welcome roles, rotating tasks, and named responsibilities — rather than just counting attendance.
Reporting Attrition Honestly When You Write Up a Connection Programme
A practice note on how to report dropout in social connection programmes without hiding it inside an average, and what a funder should actually be told.
Which Outcome Measure Will Actually Survive Renewal
A practical guide to choosing between loneliness scales, wellbeing scores, and service-use data when a commissioner asks how you know social prescribing worked.
Designing Groups That Survive Week Four
Most connection programmes do not fail at recruitment. They fail between the third and fifth session, and the causes are structural rather than motivational.
Funding the Handoff, Not Just the Referral
Commissioners fund the referral into social prescribing far more readily than the handoff out of it. The evidence on where social prescribing works points at the second gap, not the first.
Designing a Connection Evaluation You Can Actually Run
Social prescribing schemes have produced the largest published body of evaluated connection work. What their evaluations actually measured, what they got wrong, and how to design a study your team can complete with the staff you have.
What to Train Frontline Staff to Say About Loneliness
A script for the moment someone discloses loneliness to a link worker, receptionist, or line manager — and the specific phrases that undermine a well-designed programme.
Scaling a Connection Programme Without Losing What Made It Work
A sequenced approach to scaling a social connection programme, for funders and programme managers deciding whether to expand a pilot that worked.
Measuring Whether Your Connection Programme Reaches Anyone Who Needed It
Attendance numbers tell you who showed up, not who was reached. A guide to evaluating workplace connection programmes for recruitment bias, not just participation.
How Much Safeguarding Does a Drop-In Actually Need
A practice note on calibrating safeguarding for informal social programmes -- warm spaces, walking groups, peer drop-ins -- without importing clinical-service structures that undermine the thing that makes them work.
Social Prescribing's First Four Weeks: What the Sequencing Looks Like
A look at how social prescribing link worker services structure the first month after referral, and where the published evidence says that sequence tends to break down.
The Discharge Cliff: Why Time-Limited Social Prescribing Referrals Lose Their Gains
Fixed-term referral programmes report good short-term results and then watch them evaporate. A look at why the model itself, not the delivery, produces this pattern.
Measuring Volunteer Recruitment, Training, and Retention as Leading Indicators
Volunteer attrition is the metric most social connection programmes fail to track, even though it predicts outcome failure earlier than any beneficiary survey. A guide to measuring the volunteer pipeline itself.
When the Ask Outruns the Evidence
A framework for handling the moment a funder or commissioner asks you to promise an outcome the social connection literature cannot actually support.
Measuring the Health–Community Partnership, Not Just the Referral
A guide to evaluating social prescribing partnerships between health services and community organisations, with the metrics that actually distinguish a working pathway from a busy one.
Match the Intervention to the Need, Not the Diagnosis
Loneliness is not one problem. A practice note on distinguishing isolation, loneliness, and lack of social skill before choosing what training or programme to run.
Why the Older-Adult Isolation Checklist Doesn't Travel
Social prescribing measurement was built around isolated older adults. As schemes expand to young adults, new parents, and employees, the same instruments are being reused without being re-checked. Here is what that costs.
How To Write A Loneliness Programme Bid A Commissioner Will Fund
Commissioners buy risk reduction, service demand, and defensible measurement. A guide to translating a social connection programme into the terms a funding panel actually scores against, including what to do when your evidence is thin.
The Venue Line Item Funders Cut First — And Shouldn't
Grant budgets treat venue and logistics as overhead to minimise. For attendance, they are the intervention. A practice note on the line items that quietly decide who shows up.