Social prescribing for people with ongoing health problems in Cwm Taf Morgannwg

October 2022

Background of the project
This project was a collaboration between a team from PRIME Centre Wales, Cardiff University, and staff and service users from the Cwm Taf Morgannwg Wellness Improvement Service (WISe). The team led by Dr Freya Davies, a GP clinical fellow, with Professor Fiona Wood, a medical sociologist, and Dr Kate Lifford, Research Associate, all based at PRIME, aimed to understand what people thought a service like WISE could do for them, how they thought it could be improved, and how they experienced being involved. As part of the WISe, people were offered the opportunity to attend a variety of creative arts workshops and we attended two of these workshops to see and hear how they worked.

Training
We wanted to learn more about how we could work together meaningfully with a range of different people who have an interest in WISe. We asked the organisation Co-production Wales to come and deliver training to members of the university staff and staff from the WISe team. Sixteen staff attended and gave great feedback about the session and its relevance to their work (pictured above).
 
Co-production engagement event
Co-production Wales then helped us to plan a session for staff and service users to find out more about what wellness meant to them and how WISe could contribute to this. Here is the summary of what we found.

Arts workshops
We worked with two artists who have been providing workshops as part of WISe: Ursula Frank from Taiko Drumming Wales (Link) and Becky Adams (link) who is running Creative Crafts workshops. We attended their workshops to see how they ran and talk to the participants about what they thought about them. We also heard about what benefits they had seen from attending the other WISe activities.

Producing a film
We worked with a local video production company to capture people’s experiences.  We have produced two films together with WISe users and staff.  The first video talks broadly about the benefits of an approach like WISe and the second video gives more details on the Arts in Health aspect of the service.  We hope these films will be shared widely so people can understand how approaches like this can be helpful.

Further information 
For further information about the WISE project, please visit the Cwm Taf UHB WISE webpages.