Month: April 2025

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing #3

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

So I have to request you be patient for a little longer. Here’s a third take on the changes intended for the National Health Service and how these changes take it into the arms of the Christian church, and how they can help re-establish the church in its centuries-old role as centre-piece of the good in a local community.

A newspaper report in April 25 said this:

The NHS is attempting to ease the pressure on GPs and A&E by sending a new type of health worker door to door in deprived areas to help detect illnesses before people need urgent care.

Community health and wellbeing workers (CHWW) are already deployed in 12 areas of England, with 13 others to follow, in an attempt to improve poor and vulnerable people’s access to care.

Each worker is responsible for 120-150 households, usually on a council estate, which they visit once a month to help residents with money, isolation and housing problems, as well as their health.

Wes Streeting, the heath secretary, is examining the scheme as he pulls together ideas to help “fix” the NHS that may be included in the forthcoming 10-year health plan. 1 The article points out these CHWWs ‘are not clinically trained staff, like doctors, nurses and health visitors. They are mostly recruited from the communities they work in and trained up for the role.’

It quotes the program managed of the National Association of Primary Care as follows:

‘CHWWs are supporting residents to access earlier and more appropriate forms of care, often in community settings.

‘They’re also helping to address wider determinants of health – like housing, finances and loneliness – which are frequently the root cause of escalating health issues that end up in A&E.

‘Their job is to build relationships with the people in their households and with health professionals and NHS services locally.’

Nothing in the article mentions the church. But what a nice job for someone as a CHWW, with formal or informal links to faith communities.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing #2

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

So last week we saw that the UK National Health Service, groping its way to being a Neighbourhood Health Service, is seeing the value of directing people from GP surgeries to community groups. Faith groups–and especially in the UK, Christian churches–are the main source of community groups, and they are everywhere.

In a report about all this, the Theos thinktank notes that some GP practices employ social prescribing link workers (SPLWs, because the world needs more acronyms) to make and maintain these connections. So far so good. But the people at Theos make these observations:

  1. Where there’s a high turnover of SPLWs, many of the links are lost.
  2. When SPLWs merely ‘signpost’ people to things a lot of the potency of social prescribing is lost. (This is true generally with the dread word ‘signposting’. People are often refused help by one agency or another and ‘signposted’ elsewhere. This is fine for the people who are turning people away, but not so good for the people who are being turned away). It’s much better when SPLWs get to know groups personally and also take people along to them. The personal relationships matter much more than a listing of providers.

As the report said:

..We found a number of challenges … There are communication challenges because faith and health communities use different language to talk about very similar things. It is challenging for faith groups to connect and maintain relationships with the ever-changing social prescribing system. Similarly, link workers and local health practicioners don’t kow where to go to connect with local faith groups. Furthermore, there are administrative challenges that slow processes down and a lack of funding to keep activities running. (p15)

Further, ‘one explanation for poor integration between faith groups and healthcare workers … is stretched capacity in the NHS’ (p61).

But social prescribing is a ‘thing’ and the NHS has a long term plan for every person in England to access social prescribing through their GP eventually. 2

3. While there are relatively many hospital chaplains, there are relatively few ‘GP chaplains’ and this is a missed opportunity. N0t only so, but a qualification in social prescribing takes about 5 months’ study 3. No doubt lots of people have thought of this, but a GP chaplain who was also a trained social prescriber could make themselves very useful; if they were funded by a collaboration of churches, they would be less dependent on the vicissitudes of government provision.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing

Sometimes you read something and it feels like you’ve swallowed a lit firework.

This happened to me recently, when I was reading a report from those good people at the Theos thinktank. I found myself catching myself to hold back the tears.

This is the report:https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/research/2025/01/27/creating-a-neighbourhood-health-service-the-role-of-churches-and-faith-groups-in-social-prescribing

And I recommend you waste half an hour of your working day to read it. It’ll be time much better spent than doomscrolling.

The idea is simple and one that I’ve touched on before in this blog. Here I found myself lifting the curtain and seeing a whole landscape of people who have not just already thought of this but are integrating into their practice, and researching the problems, and finding ways forward, actual doers doing it. In other words, a bandwaggon, and this is me jumping on.

  1. Health care providers see the need for ‘social prescribing’ (involving people in caring communities) as a necessary supplement to their medical work. Indeed many people visit their doctors because their sickness is actually a mask for other ills, like grief or loneliness.
  2. Churches have been working for the common good for centuries.
  3. Why not put them together?

Here’s what our current Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, said about the report:

Faith groups are continuing a beautiful, centuries–old tradition of caring for your neighbour. They are delivering front line activities that will play a key role in shifting the focus of our health service from hospital to community, and sickness to prevention in the coming years. I welcome this report from Theos, which asks the right questions about how we can link faith groups into the system to provide partnership and support.” – Wes Streeting MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom

Or or a past president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Clare Gerada:

I wholeheartedly endorse the invaluable role of faith groups in the social prescribing framework, as outlined in this report. By fostering trusted relationships and providing holistic support, faith communities are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between healthcare and wellbeing, offering a preventative approach that prioritizes connection, care and community.

From the foreword:

Social prescribing utilises community offerings as non-clinical remedies in recognition that some things can be treated both more effectively and more cheaply this way. The particular genius of this is that in doing so, people know each other better; relationships between statutory and community groups are formed and become well-trodden; and when moments of crisis arrive, not only are communities healthier at local level, but more resilient.

In one sense, none of this is new; in another it is a confluence of trends in medicine, society and church that suddenly opens a vast horizon of opportunity.

  • Health care people know how vital is the social stuff surrounding a person’s health. We have an epidemic of mental ill-health (or possibly an epidemic of mental ill-health diagnoses) and we have another cluster of people with the too-much-stress illnesses caused by their bodies running hot with anxiety.
  • Many people are lonely and isolated, propped up by benefits.
  • Churches are caring for the common good in practically every community.

It seems there is within the NHS a job role called a Social Prescribing Link Worker whose job is to connect patients at GP practices to local community groups. It can be that on a single street, next door even, a GP practice can exist in one silo and a church with its community cafe or craft group in another silo. The SPLW’s role, paid for by the taxpayer, is to link people across silos.

Imagine if this were common: every GP practice, every faith community, personally linked together and held together by a network of relationships. Imagine the creativity, the imagination, the good and the healing that could flow.

Finally, though this is a branching-out for the NHS, they are branching out into something churches are already doing. My own little church has basically missed every trend that has passed through the Christian community in the past 40 years, with the possible exceptions of minor brushes with charismatic Christianity, the Alpha course, and worship songs that were contemporary twenty years ago.

But we haven’t missed community groups for the common good because it’s what we do: a community cafe, food supplies, separate men’s and women’s breakfasts, a carpet-bowling club, a craft cafe. We do this all the time for the common good and also because, further in, people may find the glowing Rock at our centre and a framework, indeed a Person, around whom to construct a good life and a good death. They may find worship. They may find they can step back from the daily routine and glimpse eternity. We’ve done these community things, as have so many churches, because that is what we do, because it fits the grain of who we are.

Harmless as doves

Sneaky but effective

Photo by Shubhankar Bhowmick on Unsplash

I was struck recently by the phrase ‘Wise as serpents, harmless as doves’. I must admit that I think the ‘wise as serpents’ bit comes a lot more easily to me (wily, crafty, political) than the ‘harmless as doves’ word.

It means that at a certain point, after you have done all your wise-as-serpent stuff, you are defenceless. You are approaching people with innocence. You are choosing to believe that somewhere inside them, nestled among the faults you see, is a shred of decency. Somewhere deep inside is a concern for the welfare of others. And we are to approach them, or when not actually approaching them but just thinking and talking about them, we are to treat them is if that shred of decency really was inside them, and can be awakened by someone who believes against the odds that it is there.

The Lord Jesus, I think, had the childlike innocence when threatened. Pilate: ‘Are you the King of the Jews’? Jesus: ‘Your words.’ Or after being hit in the face when being questioned by the High Priest: ‘If I spoke evil, show me. If I didn’t, why did you hit me?’ Both times, I think, he’s probing inside the other person to justify what they just said or did, not slandering or insulting them; his innocence is disarming and unnerving.

It feels weak. But in fact it is a deadly infusion of grace that they may not know how to handle. They are used to fighting, being opposed, lobbing ordinance from their trench. They are not used to being told, by someone who opposes them, that they have a difficult job and perhaps they could be doing it better.