Citizens Advice Ways to Wellbeing for All Scaling up a wider determinants of health offer across first level services

The Liverpool Advice on Prescription in Primary Care project (Liverpool APP), run by South Liverpool Citizens Advice, was set up in 2014 to help alleviate poverty and hardship among people with long-term conditions and/or co-morbid mental health problems.

Liverpool APP provides a social treatment option for primary care teams to address underlying causes of ill health, for example financial hardship, housing difficulties, debt, domestic abuse, social isolation and fuel poverty. The service currently takes direct referrals from GPs and mental health services, responding to urgent need as well as providing ongoing support.

An Innovating Improvement project has identified which specialist care pathways for people with long-term conditions would benefit the most from embedding the APP interventions. The APP has now been re-launched as ‘Citizens Advice Ways to Wellbeing’ and is established as part of a linked dataset that includes primary care, mental health services, acute care and adult social care.

This Spreading Improvement project will involve scaling up the approach across Liverpool, with a focus on child and maternal health services. Across Merseyside, children and young people experience higher levels of poor health and higher inequalities compared to the rest of the country.

The aim of this project is to identify patients, in particular women during the perinatal period, whose health and wellbeing is being adversely impacted by these underlying issues, and to mitigate health risks relating to poverty wherever possible. It will aim to improve access to health and wellbeing assets for these patients, and to improve outcomes.

Contact information

For further information about the project, please contact Clare Mahoney, Programme Lead,Liverpool CCG