Wellbeing and Social Prescribing
Historic England's work on using heritage interactions to improve well being through social prescribing.
What is Social Prescribing?
Social Prescribing is connecting people to activities, groups and support that improve health and wellbeing
Many things that affect our health can’t be treated by doctors or medicine alone - like loneliness, stress, financial worries, difficulties at home or pressures at work.
Social prescribing connects people to non-medical support to address these issues and other unmet needs. Schemes can involve a variety of activities, such as volunteering, gardening, befriending and group support, arts classes, exercise or local history clubs - often provided by voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations.
Find out more about social prescribing and how it works in practice via the National Academy for Social Prescribing’s website.
How can heritage help? What is the evidence?
Historic England’s Heritage and Social Prescribing evidence report highlighted some of the main benefits of engaging with heritage and the historic environment:
- Connection with heritage improves our feelings of identity and belonging and helps alleviate loneliness
- Heritage activities promote good brain health and strengthen our memory
- Exploring heritage and history offers an exciting journey of discovery
- Learning from ours and others past provides insight, resilience and inspiration for the future
- Revealing the past of a place and its historic significance helps us understand it and connect with it better, promoting pride of place
- Heritage shows us that we are part of something bigger – it is inseparable part of us and our own legacy in this time and place
Heritage and Social Prescribing Community of Practice
Through its collaboration with NASP and the support of the Wellbeing & Heritage Group, created and facilitated jointly with the Council for British Archaeology (CBA), Historic England established the Heritage and Social Prescribing Community of Practice. It brings together heritage organisations, practitioners and Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise organisations interested in and practically delivering social prescribing through interaction with heritage. It is free to join and open to all - currently meets quarterly and offers a platform to share knowledge and experience, develop resources and advice and collaborate on future projects.
Aims and Objectives of the Community of Practice
The Heritage and Social Prescribing Community of Practice has been established with the main aim to create a space for networking and sharing of good practice between national and local heritage organisations interested in social prescribing.
The community will also have the following objectives:
- Facilitate collaboration between its members and promote learning and development in the areas of heritage and social prescribing
- Support partnerships and knowledge exchange, including with other sectors, such as health, nature, physical activity and arts & culture
- Develop and produce guidance and related policies (including ethic standards) for implementing social prescribing in heritage activities – and as a potential base for sector training on social prescribing
- Develop and produce evaluation toolkits / frameworks for efficient measurement of the wellbeing effects of engaging with the historic environment and heritage via social prescribing pathways
- Gather further evidence and data (including case studies) on the positive effects of heritage interventions through social prescribing
- Facilitate research collaboration in the area of heritage and social prescribing
- Create a repository of resources on heritage and social prescribing which can be accessed and contributed to by all members of the community.
Joining the community of practice
To express your interest in joining the Community of practice please get in touch with Desi Gradinarova at [email protected] .
Heritage Connectors and Heritage Buddies
Heritage Buddies and Heritage Connectors are innovative pilot schemes, funded by Historic England, trialling two approaches for delivering social prescribing and wellbeing through heritage in local settings. The schemes ran between April and November 2023.
The Heritage Connectors project was delivered by Frome Medical Practice and their social prescribing service Health Connections Mendip. They tested the Community Connectors signposting model, used successfully in Frome (Somerset) for connecting people to social prescribing, to help link individuals and communities in need to local heritage wellbeing activities.
The Heritage Buddies project was delivered by Nottingham Community and Voluntary Service in Nottingham. It was based on the experience and practice of Natural England’s Nature Buddies scheme, aiming at helping people in need to access green social prescribing activities locally by befriending and supporting individuals to find what works for them. Heritage Buddies tested what this approach may look like for local heritage and how Buddies can help people discover and benefit from heritage activities around them.
Heritage Buddies and Heritage Connectors were evaluated externally by Wavehill Ltd. Their evaluation report is also available to be downloaded below. The two pilots contributed to increased understanding of the links between heritage and wellbeing and hold a potential to increase individual and community wellbeing, if developed in consideration of the lessons learned outlined in the evaluation report and the toolkits.
There is potential for the Heritage Buddies model to be embedded in Voluntary and Community, Faith and Social Enterprise organisations themselves, whilst the existence of heritage social prescription as an option offered for the first time by a social prescribing service hosted by a Primary Care Network demonstrates how the Heritage Connectors model can be embedded in existing health and social prescribing structures.
Both projects created toolkits, which can be downloaded below and used by communities and organisations across the country. The toolkits contain ideas and lessons learned that could inform and help apply those approaches to other places. The toolkits are not prescriptive and could be amended depending on local needs and conditions.
Download the toolkit
Download the project reports
Download the Resource pack
Linkworker Award
The Historic England-funded social prescribing pilot project Heritage Linkworker – Heritage for Wellbeing, delivered by the Restoration Trust in Great Yarmouth and Waveney, won the first-ever Award for Best Heritage Social Prescribing Project at the International Social Prescribing Conference Awards ceremony on 19 June 2024.
You can find out more about the heritage Link Worker project in the 2024 evaluation report.
Also of interest
