GP said "arts on prescription" and then nobody rang. How do you actually get on one of these?

#1stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)November 8, 2025, 4:40 pm

Eleven weeks ago my GP said, and I wrote it down afterwards because I wanted to get it right, "there's an arts on prescription thing, that might suit you". Then she typed something. Then we talked about my blood pressure and I left.

Nobody has rung. Nothing has come in the post. I rang the surgery in October and the receptionist could not find any record of a referral and was perfectly nice about it, and suggested I book another appointment, which is a fortnight away and ten minutes long and I do not want to spend it on this.

I am 63, I paint badly and constantly, and I am not asking for therapy. I would just like to be in a room with other people doing it on a Tuesday. That is the whole ambition.

What I cannot work out is whether something went wrong or whether nothing was ever set in motion. Did she refer me and it fell through a crack, or was that sentence just a sentence?

#2Marion K.(Joined Jul 2024 · 38 posts)November 8, 2025, 6:15 pm

It was a sentence. Sorry. Nothing happens unless somebody names the person who is meant to do it.

#3linkworker_sam(Joined Oct 2025 · 14 posts)November 10, 2025, 11:26 am

I am going to answer this from the inside, because I am a link worker and this thread is basically my Monday. I am posting as me and not for my employer, and nothing here is about your practice, which I do not know.

Marion is right and I want to explain the mechanics, because it is not a crack you fell through. There is no referral for "arts on prescription" in the way there is a referral to a clinic. A GP saying those words in a consulting room is a wish. It does not trigger anything on its own. What triggers something is a named role.

The sentence that works, and I would put it in exactly these words: "Please can you put me in touch with the social prescribing link worker attached to this practice." It converts a wish into a task with a completion state, and it can be said to the receptionist, the practice nurse, the pharmacist or the GP. If nobody recognises the title, try wellbeing coordinator or community connector, because it is called different things in different places. In England the role sits inside primary care networks, so I am attached to a group of practices rather than one surgery, which is why a receptionist at one of them can genuinely not know my name.

What I am is somebody with time and local knowledge. What I am not is a clinician. I do not diagnose, I do not assess clinical risk, and I do not treat.

Four things I cannot do, and I would rather you heard them from me than found out over three months.

I cannot create provision. If there is no course near you, I have nothing to connect you to and no budget to start one. That is the commonest ending and it is nobody's fault in the room.

I cannot arrange a registered arts therapy. Art therapy, music therapy and dramatherapy are clinical work and they come through a clinical referral, a school or charity, or private practice. A link worker cannot arrange one and anybody telling you otherwise is confusing two different things.

I cannot prescribe anything, and neither can your GP, whatever the name suggests. Nothing is dispensed, there is no entitlement, there is no national standard and there is no waiting time target. If a place exists you may get it. If it does not, nothing is owed to you and I know how that reads written down.

And I usually cannot override the eligibility criteria, because they belong to whoever funds the course rather than to the activity. Age band, postcode, a diagnosis, sometimes a required referral source. I have had to turn away people who would obviously have loved it because they lived on the wrong side of a boundary.

Two things that will save you time. Ask "when does the next block start", not "how long is the wait", because these run as fixed intakes of usually 8 to 10 weeks rather than rolling admission, so the honest answer is a date and not a queue position. And ask how long the scheme is funded for, which sounds rude and is the single most useful question anybody asks me.

Last thing, and it is the one people are too polite to try. You can very often just ring the arts organisation yourself. Self referral is accepted more widely than people think, it is not queue jumping, and it is frequently faster than coming through me. Your ambition, in your own words, is to be in a room with other people painting on a Tuesday. An ordinary class you pay for does that too, and in my experience it is the most durable option of the lot, because it does not end when a grant does. How to get referred to an arts scheme has the wording and the questions, and social prescribing explained covers what the role actually is, including how small the arts corner of it is. Maybe one in twelve of my referrals is anything creative. The rest is benefits advice, housing, food, forms and appeals.

#4stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)November 11, 2025, 10:03 am

That is the most useful thing anybody has said to me about the NHS in about four years and I am slightly annoyed about how simple it turned out to be.

One in twelve is a number I did not expect and it recalibrates the whole thing. I had a picture of an arts on prescription service sitting there with a waiting list, and actually it is one small corner of somebody's much larger job, and I have been waiting eleven weeks for a thing that was never switched on.

Booked a phone slot for next week and I have the sentence written on the back of an envelope.

#5mikeatthepiano(Joined Feb 2025 · 19 posts)November 14, 2025, 9:37 pm

Went the other route with mine. Rang the arts centre directly, asked if I could just turn up, and the woman sounded surprised anybody had asked. Started the following week.

#6stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)January 19, 2026, 2:52 pm

Update for anybody finding this later, and it is a mixed one.

The sentence worked. Spoke to a link worker within nine days, lovely, gave me twenty five minutes and knew things about this town I have lived in for thirty years and did not know.

Bad news is there is no arts course running here at all. The one that used to run stopped in 2024 when the funding ended, which she told me straight away rather than letting me hope, and I appreciated that more than I expected to.

Good news is that she gave me two names, one of which is a community art group in a village hall four miles away that charges four pounds and has nothing to do with any scheme, and I have been three times. Nobody has assessed me and nobody is measuring anything about me, and on the evidence of this thread that is roughly what the referred version would have amounted to anyway, except it would have stopped after ten weeks.