Shaping Nottingham’s active travel social prescribing programme

The challenge

The NHS wanted to give people more choice over the care they receive which included the prescription of non-clinical treatment to support people to become more active, get outdoors and re-connect with others to improve their health. 

Active Travel England (ATE) supported this by funding a select number of cities to take part in active travel pilot projects. With an existing social prescribing offer already in place, Nottingham were keen to secure funding to expand their support, but this meant bringing together healthcare and transport professionals to scope the programme, referral pathways and activities, which is where our support came in. 

The solution

Nottingham City Council (NCC) needed to submit a compelling funding bid to ATE to show their capacity, commitment, and readiness to implement active travel social prescribing. This included demonstrating engagement with stakeholders to co-design the programme. 

We worked alongside the Council to bring together transport professionals, active travel providers and healthcare partners to scope referral pathways and advise on appropriate interventions to support behaviour change. We hosted two citywide stakeholder workshops, three neighbourhood-specific workshops and numerous 1-2-1 discussions with referral partners. Feedback from these activities were then used refine the programme. 

Upon being awarded pilot status we continued to support the Council by carrying out a process evaluation for the first 12 months of the programme. This included the analysis of surveys completed by participants and examining interview scripts from delivery partners and key stakeholders to review progress, risks and lessons learned.

The result

The co-design stakeholder engagement we supported the Council with helped to shape the Travel Well programme and drew together the insights from key partners to provide a clear referral programme for each beneficiary group which supported the Council to secure funding for the pilot. 

Our independent, interim process evaluation summarised the progress that had been made during its first 12 months of delivery, documented the lessons learnt from partners and provided recommendations for continuing to enhance the success of the programme in the remaining 2-years.