In this episode, IFIC Chief Executive Dr Niamh Lennox-Chhugani is joined by Anna Wilding, Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, speaking from Melbourne.
Anna is a co-author of the recent paper Impact of the rollout of the national social prescribing link worker programme on population outcomes: evidence from a repeated cross-sectional survey, published in the British Journal of General Practice (available here: https://bjgp.org/content/75/761/e880). Drawing on this work, she reflects on how social prescribing has been implemented through primary care networks in England and what evaluation can tell us about its impact on population outcomes and patient experience.
The conversation highlights the practical challenges of evaluating complex, system-wide interventions — including data access and governance barriers, working with imperfect real-world data, and balancing methodological rigour with pragmatic decision-making. Together, they explore what evaluation can (and can’t yet) tell us about social prescribing at scale, why early involvement of evaluators matters, and how multidisciplinary teams can produce more meaningful and useful insights for policymakers and practitioners.
On making complex evaluation accessible
“We knew we weren’t going for quite a general journal… so we wanted to make it as accessible as possible for people to understand.”
On linking data to study social prescribing
“We applied for data from the GP patient survey… and then we linked it with data sets from NHS Digital… that’s where the social prescribing link workers are funded from.”
On why evaluation design matters from the start
“The data wasn’t designed for research… so our ethics committee… wasn’t going to allow us to access that data for research.”
On the need to involve evaluators early
“It would be good to have the people who would be evaluating it embedded in the process from the beginning.”
On pragmatism versus perfection
“Sometimes done is better than perfect.”
On limits of causality in complex systems
“We have associations… but we might not know that this definitely caused this.”
On managing expectations about impact
“It’s not going to have these massive effects that we’re sort of expecting.”
On the value of multidisciplinary teams
“Them together actually makes a more powerful message… mixing together is better.”
On big data and its limits
“Sometimes the big data isn’t well collected either, even if you think it is.”
