Evidence Hub

Reviewing hospital-initiated social prescribing schemes for children with neurodisability/neurodivergence and their families

Who is this evidence useful for?

This evidence is useful for people who are considering ways of developing support services for children with neurodisability or other complex chronic needs. This includes healthcare providers and commissioners.

Quick-read summary

Neurodisability occurs when the nervous system has been affected by a medical condition and function is affected. An example is cerebral palsy. Many children with neurodisability have high levels of medical needs. They and their families also often have high levels of unmet non-medical needs which may be financial, emotional or social.

Social prescribing link workers can help families access support to address these needs.

Social prescribing link workers connect people to community-based support, including activities and services that meet practical, social, and emotional needs that affect their health and wellbeing. This includes connecting people to statutory services for example housing, financial and welfare advice. You can find out more here.

We undertook a review of social prescribing link worker support, initiated in a hospital setting.

What is the issue?

Social prescribing can improve wellbeing in adults. There is some evidence of its benefit for children but there are very few social prescribing schemes to support children.

Families of children with neurodisability are often under financial strain and struggle to access community services. Some such children have frequent and/or prolonged hospital stays.

Social prescribing link worker support to children and their families could start whilst they are in hospital, and then support them with accessing community services.

Research summary

We undertook a systematic review of research that had already been completed, to look for studies describing social prescribing interventions for children and young people with neurodisability. We wanted to read about studies describing support that was initiated in a hospital setting. We are aware that the terminology is imperfect and that some people prefer the term ‘neurodivergence’ so this was also included in the search.

A systematic review begins by thoroughly searching online databases to make sure that every relevant publication has been found that might answer the specific question being asked.

We then read the papers, considered how well the studies were done, and summarised the evidence.

What the research found

Results: 

We found 8 papers which described hospital initiated social prescribing schemes for children and young people with neurodisability. Some papers described the same schemes, so in fact there were only five different schemes to review.

One scheme was for children and young people who had recently been diagnosed with vision problems, and their families. Both emotional support and provision of information about relevant services were valued by families. The paper also comments on benefits to healthcare professionals, whose time was freed up for clinical issues.

There were three schemes from the same group, which all provided support for children and young people who had had a head injury. The support was provided online and involved a mixture of self guided web-based resources and therapist/coaching support. Various benefits were reported including improved social behaviours.

One study described a scheme providing non medical support to children with fetal alcohol syndrome and their mothers but did not provide any evidence about benefits.

Why is this important?

Studies reported benefits to health, well-being, healthcare usage, knowledge, skills, satisfaction and service delivery. Yet this type of service provision is very rare.

How were people/community groups/patients involved in this work?

Before we started this review we did an online survey to ask parents of children with neurodisability about their views on a hospital-initiated social prescribing service.

We also spoke to link workers and others about terminology and became aware of the challenges around the term neurodisability. We changed the study to include the word ‘neurodivergence’ as well in the search.

What’s next?

We identified a large amount of unmet non-medical need in this group, which the link workers helped families to address. We will write about this study separately. We hope to develop a model of hospital based link worker support that can be used widely for the benefit of children with complex health needs and their families.

The systematic review along with a pilot at the Great North Children’s Hospital will help us to apply for further funding and gain further support/traction so that this approach can be implemented more widely

Get in touch about this research

Dr Anna Basu

[email protected]

@AnnaBasu1

Read the full research paper

Social prescribing for children and young people with neurodisability and their families initiated in a hospital setting: a systematic review – BMJ Open, December 2023

Contributing authors

Katie Gordon

Laura Gordon