Patient and stakeholder engagement on the role that Social Prescribing might play in supporting the health and wellbeing of people diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

There is no standardised clinical care for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) postdiagnosis. Social prescribing could potentially address this gap, as it enables people to access a range of non-clinical organisations and activities to support their health and wellbeing. However there has been little research on the role of social prescribing specifically for people living with MCI. This project entailed Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in order to inform the development of future research in this area. We invited people with MCI to talk to us about their experiences of life with the condition and about any impact those memory problems had on their lives. An anonymised film of public contributors’ inputs was created and shared with a range of healthcare professionals, to prompt their reflections on the potential benefits and challenges of offering social prescribing to patients with MCI. There was consensus among public and professional contributors that social prescribing could offer opportunities for patients to address social isolation and to mitigate the impacts of MCI and linked conditions (e.g. anxiety) on cognitive and social functioning. We recommend as the next step a feasibility study to assess the acceptability and logistics of social prescribing among patients with MCI and the healthcare professionals who support them, on a larger scale and for a more sustained period than was possible in this preliminary work.