The Aberdeen Links Programme has been officially rolled out across the whole city.
As of April 2019, every GP practice now as a Primary Care Link Practitioner attached and they have started to receive referrals from health care professionals.
Following three-weeks of training and induction, the second cohort of Primary Care Link Practitioners have joined the rest of the team, so we now have 20 people in post.
Aberdeen Links aims to support people to live well by strengthening connections between community resources, third sector organisations and primary care and to enhance social prescribing in Aberdeen. Link Working aims to reduce the negative impact of social and economic circumstances on someone’s health and wellbeing.
The role is to provide a person-centred service that is responsive to the needs of the practice population. The Link Practitioners will work with and support patients to identify issues that affect their ability to live well and help them to address these.
The programme recognises the pressures that GPs and primary care colleagues are under and brings an opportunity to integrate a different skill-set into the practice team, as well as supporting the existing staff to use local resources more effectively.
The Link Practitioners are all employed by the Scottish Association for Mental Health, who were awarded the contract for managing the resource at the beginning of 2018.
Next steps
• Link Practitioners will spend time getting to know their communities, building relationships and understanding the range of community and third sector resources that they will work very closely with
• Ongoing recruitment to the remaining 3.5FTE Link Practitioner roles
• Share our six-month outcome evaluation report about the initial impact of the service in summer 2019
• Support the embedding of the “Links Approach” in Primary Care and beyond.
We are always looking for ways in which to improve our communication and engagement. If you have any ideas/suggestions please contact: Jenny McCann, Transformation Programme Manager, Jennifer.mccann2@nhs.net