A charitable trust with seven sites in the Tameside area, Active Tameside delivers fun, exciting and accessible ways for people to be more active. Active Tameside is a health and wellbeing organisation that runs leisure facilities as well as providing vital health, wellbeing and social care services.
The Live Active exercise referral service, managed by Chelsea Mears-Graham, was set up in 2015. The service used ReferAll from its inception and has recently returned after a brief stint with a social prescribing platform, commissioned and funded through the local Integrated Care Board. The decision was made to return to ReferAll for managing all Live Active’s exercise referral services in early 2024.
"The decision to start afresh with ReferAll has made everything much simpler. ReferAll is clearer and easier to navigate than our previous system,” explains Mears-Graham. “The whole of Greater Manchester and GMActive use ReferAll, so it’s especially good for us as we can liaise with all the different organisations in our region. The eventual aim is to bring the whole of GMActive’s services under one hub, so that we can do hub-wide reporting and get a true Manchester-wide picture.”
“With ReferAll, when you’re on a patients’ dashboard, everything is so user friendly. The tabs mean it’s much harder to miss a step during data collection and the prompts are invaluable. With fewer mishaps during collection we get cleaner data and far fewer issues with reporting. The easy access history also helps me to manage my staff, as I can quickly see if something hasn’t been done during a consultation. I especially like the fact any team member can see everything about a client within a few clicks, from where they were referred from to their age and health data – it’s so easy to navigate. The staff also love the fact ReferAll sends out automated booking reminders. We used to have to type these manually, which was time consuming and open to errors.
“The ReferAll team are always there to help with technical issues or questions; they’re very quick. If I have a problem, they’re always at the end of the line, I never have to wait for help.”
As a predominantly zero commissioned funding, self-sustainable service, Live Active uses ReferAll’s monthly reporting capability to provide its Directors of Health and Social Outcomes as well as the CEO with accurate figures. "Because we are a self-sustainable service, these outcome reports are really essential,” says Mears-Graham. “For example, we report on the number of referrals we get, percentage uptake, active participation and completion, plus the number of clients referred in from the highest areas of deprivation in Tameside. The health quality improvements we can show from ReferAll speak louder than any financial gains for a service like ours. Tameside is one of the unhealthiest boroughs in Greater Manchester and having data that shows we’re having a positive impact and tackling inequalities is really powerful.”
"As self-referral is one of our highest referral pathways, access to data as granular as this also helps me to identify which GPs and Primary Care Networks are not referring to us. If we know we’re getting high referrals from one area, but not from another, we can approach those care teams to find out why not. It’s as powerful to see where people aren’t coming from as where they are, and means we can tap into funding in that area to engage better with community partners.”
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