Guidance 35
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where Attendance Actually Collapses, and What to Design Around It
Group-based connection programmes don't lose people gradually. They lose them at a specific point in the run. A look at how trial designs, social prescribing, and consumer platforms have each built around that point.
Training the Handoff Between Clinic and Community
Social prescribing depends on a moment neither health services nor community organisations are trained to manage well: the handoff. Here is what to train, and who, before you build the referral pathway.
Choosing Between a Digital and In-Person Group: What the Evidence Actually Supports
Before you build a group programme, decide whether it runs online or in a room. The evidence on which format reduces loneliness is thinner than most funders assume — here is how to make the call and measure it honestly.
What HINTS-6 Changes About Training Frontline Staff on Loneliness
A new federal estimate splits loneliness into severity states. That distinction should change the script link workers, receptionists, and community staff use — not just the statistic they cite.
Reach Metrics Tell You Who You Missed, Not Whether It Worked
Attendance counts and outcome scores answer different questions. A practice note on why training programmes need both, and what happens when they collect only one.
How Informal Connection Programmes Handle Safeguarding Without Killing the Informality
Volunteer-led social groups sit awkwardly between clinical services and pure informality. A look at how organisations in this space have set safeguarding thresholds, trained non-professional facilitators, and decided what a volunteer is not responsible for.
Evaluating Connection Training Without a Research Budget
A practical design for evaluating staff training in social connection skills, built around what a programme team can actually measure without a control group or a grant for a trial.
Safeguarding in Informal Social Programmes: What Actually Needs a Policy
Befriending schemes, walking groups, and social prescribing activities carry real safeguarding risk despite their informal feel. This note sets out which risks need a written procedure and which need judgement.
Building a Volunteer Programme That Outlasts Its Founders
A framework for recruiting, training, and retaining volunteers in connection-focused programmes, built around the point where most of them fail: month three.
What to Train Frontline Staff to Say When They Ask About Loneliness
A script-level guide to training link workers and clinicians to ask about social isolation and loneliness without triggering stigma, false reassurance, or the fix-it reflex.
Matching the Intervention to the Need: How Programmes Have Approached Targeting
Befriending, group activities, and skills training address different problems. A case-approach look at how organisations have matched intervention type to isolation versus loneliness versus deficient social skills.
How to Report Attrition Without Hiding the Failure Rate
A step-by-step approach to reporting who dropped out of a connection programme and why, so the numbers survive scrutiny from a funder or a skeptical board.
When to Close a Group Down
A decision framework for programme managers and link workers on ending a social connection group well, rather than letting it run past the point it does any good.
Training Frontline Staff to Talk About Loneliness: What the Evidence Supports
Funders now pay for isolation screening in social prescribing and primary care contracts. What frontline staff are trained to say matters more than whether they screen at all — and the published evidence points to a specific script problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Training Frontline Staff on Loneliness: What to Say and What Not to Say
A look at how social prescribing and health-system programmes have approached the specific problem of language: how frontline staff should raise loneliness with someone, and the phrases that undermine trust before the conversation starts.
How to Script Loneliness Conversations Without Making Them Worse
What to train link workers, receptionists, and support staff to say when someone discloses loneliness — and the three phrases that reliably shut disclosure down.
How to Match a Connection Intervention to the Actual Deficit
A procedure for diagnosing what kind of social disconnection someone actually has before assigning a group, an activity, or a referral — because the wrong match wastes both the budget and the person's last attempt.
Running a Group Online or in a Room: A Decision Framework
A structured way to decide whether a connection-focused group should meet digitally or in person, and what changes about facilitation, retention, and evaluation once you've chosen.
Who Is Responsible When Something Goes Wrong in a Walking Group
Social prescribing schemes route people into informal community groups run largely by volunteers. A look at how the sector has handled the safeguarding gap this creates, and what it still hasn't solved.
Writing the Case for Support in Commissioner Language
How social prescribing services and connection programmes translate loneliness outcomes into the risk, cost, and service-use language commissioners actually fund — and where that translation runs ahead of the evidence.
What Breaks When You Scale a Social Prescribing Programme
The evidence on social prescribing keeps pointing to one design feature that makes it work — and it is the first thing to erode when a pilot goes national. What training needs to protect.
What to Train Link Workers to Say About Loneliness
Social prescribing link workers are routinely asked to raise loneliness with patients. Most training tells them what to screen for. Almost none tells them what to say.
Evaluating Training on Loneliness and Connection Without an RCT Budget
A sequenced approach to evaluating loneliness or connection training that a small programme can actually run, without borrowing the trappings of a clinical trial it cannot afford.
The First Four Weeks of a New Connection Group: A Sequence
A week-by-week procedure for launching a group-based social connection programme, built around the point where most groups lose people: the session after the welcome.
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.
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.
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.