Doing What Matters (2021)
In Winter Spring 2021, Devon County Council funding enabled us to deliver and undertake robust measurement of Zoom delivered workshops that we offer with Devon Recovery Learning Community (part of the NHS). We delivered 50 workshop sessions in conjunction with Devon Recovery Learning Community (part of the NHS) supporting 74 people.
We used the Warwick Edinburgh Wellbeing Scale (WEWBM). The data collected has added to the evidence of the impact of our courses, and offered a deeper understanding of the people we are supporting. Before taking our courses, our participants had the lowest wellbeing scores in relation to the statements, ‘I’ve had energy to spare, I’ve been feeling confident, I’ve been feeling useful, and I’ve been feeling relaxed.’ Our participants also had the greatest improvement in their wellbeing indicators against two of these statements.
Our data breakdowns against five of our remote delivery courses (Textiles & Nature, Craftfulness, Slow Stitch, Silent Zoom, Patchwork for Wellbeing), indicating (potentially especially useful for social prescribers) the particular strengths of each course: eg around sense of usefulness, feeling good about oneself, energy levels, interest in others, and decision-making ability.
Around this, we identified targets around engaging social prescribers – because we believe our courses could be an important part of social prescriptions in Devon going forward. Through our project we identified 119 social prescribers and link workers, and directly engaged 5 Whilst we think the WEWBM data has an important role to play in effectively working with these stakeholders, the funding also empowered us to capture some rich feedback from participants — to testify to the impact of the courses.
A free webinair event explored the question ‘Why prescribe art?’ to tease out various participant and tutor views of what worked and why.
A selected transcript of this event was circulated to all attendees. In conjunction with the event, and then a few days later, National #SocialPrescribingDay, we released four videos co-created with participants, exploring the same question with direct correlation to the courses delivered with the Doing What Matters Funding. These video continue to circulate on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
