Wellbeing Case Study Heritage Linkworker Project
The Heritage Link Worker project (Heritage for Wellbeing), was an innovative social prescribing project, commissioned by Historic England and delivered by the Restoration Trust between November 2022 and May 2024.
About the project
The pilot successfully established a local social prescribing pathway in the area of Great Yarmouth and Waveney for referring people with mental ill health and affected by loneliness and social isolation to heritage wellbeing activities. More than 80 local people dealing with a variety of health problems, such as depression, anxiety, isolation and decreased mobility benefitted from the Heritage 4 Health programme, developed by the project. The Heritage Link Worker project increased awareness across Norfolk’s social prescribing services of the potential of heritage to deliver wellbeing and provided evidence on how it can work within social prescribing.
The heritage sector is notably behind in contributing to the provision of social activities “on prescription”, mainly due to a lack of connection between the heritage and health sectors and low awareness amidst link workers about the wellbeing potential of engagement with heritage.
The Restoration Trust has worked for many years in helping people with mental ill health access and benefit from engagement with culture and heritage. They used this experience to explore the potential of a specialist Heritage Linkworker to collaborate with local social prescribing providers in the area of Great Yarmouth and Waveney, such as the GP Practice in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust – community mental health team, D.I.A.L, ACT, and Norfolk County Council’s Life Connectors Service. The successful partnerships helped create new social prescribing referal pathways connecting local people in need with heritage activities and organisations in Great Yarmouth and Waveney, including within the Heritage Action Zones in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. The project addressed the barriers that prevent people on low income and with poor health from enjoying local heritage, such as access, transport and low confidence.
However, the delivery model changed during the first three months of the project, largely due to the limited capacity of local heritage organisations and social prescribers to offer continued engagement of individuals with health needs. As a result, the Heritage Linkworker themselves established and faciliatted ‘Heritage for Wellbeing Groups’, which run in Great Yarmouth, Gorleston and Lowestoft continuoulsy for the duration of the project. The groups helped people referred by local social prescribers to access and enjoy activities, such as exploring local history, creating creative responses in art, photography, writing and other art forms.
Over the two years and a half, the group members visited a range of local heritage sites such as the Great Yarmouth Winter Gardens, the local Hippodrome Circus and Minster, Gorleston Pavilion, Norwich and Framlingham Castles, Caistor Roman Project, Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, and took part in the Gt Yarmouth HAZ mapping project, undertook trips to the Cambridge Archaeological Unit and Anthropology Museum, participated in archaeological digs at Sutton Hoo and Warham Camp, and in the Living in Changing Landscapes project and exhibition, amidst others.
Evaluation and impact
The project’s evaluation showed that as a result, there was a significant improvement in participants’ mental health, wellbeing and physical health, as well as reduced usage of health service (more than 60% of participants had increased WEMWBS scores, and 26% of participants have reduced their usage of health services, while 28% have reduced their medication usage). In addition, an increased awareness about the wellbeing benefits of heritage and engagement was reported amidst health and VCSE partners, social prescribers and the wider public. This led to better relationships between health and heritage for wellbeing and created new social prescribing pathway through heritage.
More widely, the Heritage Link Worker project helped make the case that heritage should be an integral part of provision for people with mental health problems.
All learnings from the Heritage Linkworker project will form the basis of the planned Heritage and Social prescribing guidance, developed in collaboration with the sector-wide heritage and Social Prescribing Community of Practice.
Due to the success of the project in having a significant positive impact on individual and community wellbeing, Restoration Trust and the H4W participant group have secured a small amount of funding to support the group in transitioning to becoming a self-sustaining voluntary-led community group.
In recognition of the achievements of the Heritage Linkworker – Heritage for Wellbeing Project, the Restoration Trust has won the Best Heritage Social Prescribing Project award for 2024, at a ceremony within the International Social Prescribing Conference in London on 19 June 2024.
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