“I think wellbeing grabbed my attention, which I think is really exciting”, General Practitioner.

A global pandemic that keeps on evolving, the closure of Neighbourhood Houses from being the open centres that they are, and an unbelievably stretched primary care sector hasn’t stopped this two-year project in laying the foundations for a bright wellbeing future.

To recap: The Wellbeing Scripts Building Project is led by the Central Highlands Association of Neighbourhood Houses based in Ballarat covering 14 houses across the central highland’s region of Victoria. The project was funded by the Commonwealth Governments Men’s and Women’s Health Chronic Disease Prevention Program for a two-year period 2020 to 2022. Health Futures Australia is the system-building partner in the project.

The purpose of the project was to prototype and test a ‘light’ social prescribing approach between General Practitioners (GPs)/Health Practitioners and Neighbourhood Houses (NH). In a nutshell, this was about awareness raising of NHs and the valuable range of services and programs they offer for everyone in the community and creating an awareness for GPs of these services, and developing a simple referral mechanism/s. This is ‘light’ social prescribing, the signposting of places of referral.

“Previously it was more of a chat … now it’s perhaps more let’s try to find something you could do?

And so, it’s perhaps just moved a bit more of a step forward”, General Practitioner.

Our intent was to design, then then test these ideas in practice. Neighbourhood Houses remained closed most of 2021, our most critical year for implementation. This meant that the range of socially connecting services and programs were not provided, those we had hope would be ‘referred’ to by GPs. Instead, we used the project time to develop a range of tools to assist GPs in referring to Neighbourhood Houses. These include: a referral template for general practices to download and apply to their practice; and a clinic poster with a QR code to scan into local offerings of the Neighbourhood Houses.

Photo: The Consolidation Session, Professor Rob Moodie speaking to Wellbeing Scripts Project participants in March 2022.

What’s next? We are super excited that the Western Primary Health Network has funded a phase 2 for Wellbeing Scripts. This project is running through to September 2022 with the aim of further in-depth interviews and distilling the insights to shape a “Wellbeing Script: Framework for the Future”.  This phase introduces a second cohort of GPs, practice nurses, and psychologists into shaping how a Wellbeing Script could suit their practice, and how the scaling of a Wellbeing Script approach would work for general practice uptake.  

To learn more about the Wellbeing Scripts Project, please visit www.chanh.org.au/wellbeingscripts/ or contact us at engage@healthfutures.org.au