Should doctors prescribe networking opportunities to patients who have long term health conditions? This was one of the interesting questions posed by Ed Miliband in the 2014 Hugo Young Memorial Lecture.
In Newcastle, some GPs don’t just prescribe drugs to patients, they also put patients who have chronic or complex conditions (such as diabetes, cancer or Parkinson’s) directly in touch with others who have the same concerns. These options for making local contacts “flash up on the doctor’s computer… in exactly the same way the other treatment options do, and they are passed on to the patient.”
Mr Miliband suggests that with just a small change to the existing information made available to GPs, we could enable all GP surgeries to create these connections.
A less “prescriptive” example of creating connections through health settings can be found in the Rushey Green Time Bank, which is based in the Rushey Green Group Practice. In timebanking schemes everyone is equal – everyone is both a giver and a receiver – which particularly helps those with health conditions to feel valued and have opportunities to connect with others.
What both these examples demonstrate is that social connections are an important part of everyone’s health and wellbeing. It’s no surprise that ‘Connect’ is the first of nef’s Five way to wellbeing.
In the public sector we know that creating connections is important, but how much time and effort (and money) are we able to put towards this? At a time when we’re defining what our ‘essential council’ looks like, and only then working out what budget will be left to do everything else, how much importance do we give to creating and strengthening networks?
In the Hugo Young lecture, Mr Miliband outlined four principles for people-powered public services that could help tackle inequality in income, opportunity and power. The idea that users of public services should be linked up and not left on their own was one of these four key principles. He reflected that “too often at the moment, rather than helping people come together, the official services feel they’ve been told by people at the centre that their job is not to help put people in touch.”
He issued a challenge to the established view of successful public service delivery, in which we measure how professionals deliver a service directly to a single user. This “letterbox” model of public services, in which users are passive recipients waiting for their service to be delivered, fails to attribute any value to our social networks (and fails to devolve any power to our communities).
The challenge is how we can make the “quality of people’s social networks with other patients, parents and service users” a part of how we evaluate public services. If we viewed good networks as a measure of success, how might we use our resources differently to build and strengthen those connections between local people?
Ed Miliband delivers Hugo Young memorial lecture – video
Ed Miliband: we need a new culture of people-powered public services – video highlights
Ed Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture – script
About Timebanking
Local social networks 