How are we evaluating our impact?

Ways to Wellness is committed to demonstrating the impact of our work through robust monitoring and evaluation. We share our learning, so others can benefit from the work we undertake.

The Waiting Well PROSPeR project will initially run for one year, to December 2023. Through this work we aim to understand better whether social prescribing can help people who are on the waiting list for operations, particularly those that need help with managing pain.

We have identified two categories of success measures that we would like to explore in this pilot:

Improved quality of life for individuals

We will use validated tools to track progress, including the Wellbeing Star™, and PAM (Patient Activation Measure). We also plan to undertake client interviews at the end of intervention.

Financial savings and clinician feedback

In order to measure financial savings, we plan to undertake a comparison between the cohort who are offered support through the pilot with a matched cohort (a group of people whose data was collected up to a maximum of 3 years ago, matched by: operation type; length of stay; Index of Multiple Deprivation scores; and morphine equivalent pain drug use).

We will compare patient outcomes on measures such as length of hospital stay, readmission rates within 28 days and number of times the patient has been seen by the pain nurse.

We will also undertake qualitative interviews with pain nurses who have been involved with patients during the pilot.

PROSPeR will initially run until December 2023, so we expect that initial data will be available by the end of this pilot period.

Click here for more information about how to get involved.