Pathway Masterclass: Evaluating Advice on Prescription

This session will share details of a three-year research and evaluation programme funded by NIHR and an accompanying improvement programme funded by the Health Foundation. This anti-poverty initiative formed part of the Liverpool Health Justice Partnership, one of the largest such partnerships in England. A core element of the programme was the creation of Liverpool Citizens Advice on Prescription, an initiative to support a whole system approach to mitigating poverty and improving the health and wellbeing of people accessing the service. The programme has provided over 14,000 interventions each year supporting over 9000 households.

Learn more about how this initiative has been delivered across a range of health and other settings, hear about the successful outcomes achieved for patients and the NHS.

The Masterclass will be led by a fantastic panel of speakers who were involved in the delivery and evaluation of the programme:

Debbie Nolan, Head of Health Programmes, Liverpool Citizens Advice

Clare Mahoney, Head of Complex Lives, Liverpool Place, Cheshire and Merseyside ICB

Ben Barr, Professor in Applied Public Health Research, Head of WHO Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on Determinants of Health Equity, University of Liverpool

Speaker biographies

Debbie Nolan, Head of Health Programmes, Liverpool Citizens Advice

Debbie has worked within the Merseyside voluntary sector for more than 25 years. Before joining Citizens Advice in 2000, she worked for women's health groups and domestic abuse services. Debbie is committed to reducing health inequalities, through the development and delivery of practical and life-enhancing services, for people furthest away from these services.

For two decades, Debbie has focused on developing Citizens Advice Liverpool’s pioneering Social Prescribing model, which provides access to practical advice and community-based wellbeing activities to patients who are assessed by their GP team as vulnerable to mental distress. Having worked within Liverpool’s diverse communities, she is committed to ensuring that poverty, gender and ethnicity lenses are placed firmly within the developing Social Prescribing models.

Clare Mahoney, Head of Complex Lives, Liverpool Place, Cheshire & Merseyside ICBs

Clare works as lead commissioner for Inclusion Health/Complex Lives for Liverpool NHS. Other roles in the NHS have included CAMHS, learning disabilities and mental health commissioning. Clare was the national lead for parental mental health and child welfare with NIMHE. She worked in community development in the voluntary sector for many years, with a particular interest in participative research with children and parents, and this led to the setting up of Keeping the Family in Mind. Clare is interested in the development of the evidence-base, and in particular how service delivery models need to adapt to ensure that they are always accessible to those who need them most.

Benjamin Barr, Professor in Applied Public Health Research, & Head of WHO Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on Determinants of Health Equity, University of Liverpool

Ben is a Professor in Applied Public Health at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on using natural experiments to evaluate the health inequalities impact of local and national social, welfare, economic and health policies. He has a particular interest in research that enables local government to promote health equity by addressing the social determinants of health. His recent research has included assessing the health inequalities impact of NHS resource allocation policy and the English health inequalities strategy, demonstrating the link between welfare reforms and adverse mental health outcomes and evaluating the impact of multiple local authority, NHS and community initiatives that aim to reduce health inequalities.

In 2020, Ben became Head of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on Determinants of Health Equity. The Centre’s work for WHO has encompassed a full range of issues from ethics to action, including concepts and principles of equity for health, strategies for tackling social inequalities in health, and an initiative to develop indicators of policy progress across Europe.