Phoenix Takes Flight (PTF): exploring usability and scalability challenges with community-based health support via social prescribing.

The Phoenix Takes Flight (PTF) research study will explore how community-based organisations delivering social prescribing initiatives can expand and grow within integrated care systems.

PTF will work with an established social prescribing programme Phoenix Rising (supported by the Thriving Communities Fund), where existing third sector partners (The Gathering Fields, Green Close, Lancashire Wildlife Trust and Mandala Preston) are currently delivering an extensive programme of art, nature and movement activities in partnership with Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust's Recovery College.

The study will draw upon the learning of the partners who collectively have over 55 years' experience of delivery in this field and the research findings produced by Lancaster University in September 2020 https://greenclose.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Phoenix_Project_Evaluation.pdf and also due in March 2022.

PTF will draw upon a growing network of community partners delivering social prescribing in the area and explore the benefits and challenges of delivering community-based health support for a wide range of participants, examining how it can be embedded into integrated care systems, and how it can grow and flourish to enable access for those populations most in need of healthcare support.

The study will use the existing network which the Phoenix and Phoenix Rising projects have grown to ensure a robust cross-section of health care providers, GP's, Social Prescribing link workers, patients and third sector organisations are involved from the study's inception through to its completion.

PTF will bring these groups together to discuss the challenges and benefits of this work, to reflectively plan the development of the work and ultimately co-produce ideas and solutions that will enable the existing programme to become more scalable in terms of service offers and more likely to be sustainable to those in need of accessing such services - thereby ultimately to 'taking flight'.

Co-production, patient voice and an open and inclusive approach to our research - informed by the knowledge of our partners - will ensure that we build an inclusive, solution-focussed outcome that will enable a collective approach to expanding social prescribing offers embedded within integrated care systems. It is our aim that the solutions provided through this research will help to tackle some of the many health inequalities existing in the North West of England.