Case Study: How Alder Hey Children’s Hospital supports local families through poverty proofing and social prescribing (2025)

Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, recognises the need to provide a poverty proofing and social prescribing offer, driven following the development of its 2030 strategy (Vision 2030) and a piece of research led by a group of clinicians who see the impact of poverty in the children and young people they see each day.

To address this, the Trust has created a Wellbeing Hub to consolidate support services for children and young people and their families. This hub aims to provide poverty proofing and social prescribing to children young people and their families who attend Alder Hey, irrespective of the specialty they see or where they live. Professor Joanne Blair, Consultant Endocrinologist and our clinical champion, recognises that socioeconomic barriers can prevent children and young people with long-term health conditions from achieving optimal health outcomes. These barriers include the burden of health conditions, financial strain, social isolation, education, cultural and language barriers, digital poverty, and access to food. Professor Blair’s work on how poverty impacts children’s health outcomes was recently published in the Archive of Diseases in Childhood.

The Wellbeing Hub model has been developed by clinicians, families and VCSE partners and is funded by the Alder Hey Children’s Charity for two years. The service is delivered by Citizens Advice Liverpool and Health Junction CIC and provides benefits/universal credit, debt, housing, travel and transport advice as well as social prescribing services, including mental wellbeing interventions, physical activity promotion, counselling, food pantries, and assistance with equipment, carer support, clothing, transport, and employability.

Referrals are made by ward teams, using a simple referral form. The hub aims to respond to requests directly with families within 72 hours. The team is continuously learning and refining its social prescribing offer through regular safety huddles and feedback. Since going live in November 2024, The Hub has supported over 60 families.

One such family was from North Wales. A dad with four other children at home, faced multiple challenges when his wife was rushed to the hospital for an emergency C-section and their baby was transferred to Alder Hey with health complications. The Mum also developed an infection after delivery. There were high transport costs for daily travel from North Wales, and the families’ finances were depleted when Dad’s paternity and sick leave were ended. There were also challenges in obtaining access to benefits as he wasn’t registered with a local GP and complications in getting the grandparents to visit the baby in hospital due to issues from lack of mobility and dementia. The Dad was also struggling with the mental and emotional distress of managing everything without his wife.

The team at the Wellbeing Hub were able to put in place a number of social prescribing interventions, including temporary registration with a local GP to enable access to a sick note and referral to Citizens Advice for financial support, accommodation at Ronald McDonald House, allowing the parents and siblings to be close to the baby, charity support for transporting the grandparents to the hospital signposting to local and North Wales-based mental wellbeing services.

This case demonstrates how social prescribing addressed the wider social and economic factors affecting the family, in addition to the immediate medical needs and the team at Alder Hey continue to develop and refine the Wellbeing Hub model and strengthen their partnerships with key local organisations.

Key Learning Points

• Ensuring our plan aligned with the Trust’s strategic vision, allowed for the necessary people resource to make things happen.
• Engaging clinical champions was crucial to not only provide an evidence base, but also to promote and engage the service across the Trust.
• Building the Wellbeing Hub is the umbrella under which all our support offers for children and young people can sit, ensures we are able to offer a rounded offer and the knowledge of what is available sits in one place.
• Although we have a physical space to host our service ours is a mixed model of virtual and face to face support.
• Any offer of support should be universal and not determined by the colour of a family’s wheelie bin.
• Adopting a PDSA approach ensures the model is continually refined and meets the needs of families.
• Social prescribing and poverty proofing is complex, always work with experts who have a track record of delivery.
• One interaction with a family could result in multiple social prescriptions based on the needs of that family
• Engage with all VCSE partners to share vision and plans e.g. LCVS partners.

Many thanks to Jenny Dalzell, Strategic Partnership Lead, Alder Hey for providing this case study.

3rd April 2025