Ways to Wellness
Creating sustained lifestyle changes and improved self-care for people living with long-term health conditions in Newcastle, via social prescribing.
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Ways to Wellness
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Cabinet Office
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Newcastle Gateshead Clinical Commissioning Group
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First Contact Clinical
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Healthworks Newcastle
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Changing Lives
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Mental Health Concern
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Location
Newcastle
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Launch
Mar 2015
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Area
Health, Wellbeing & Independence
Collaborators & funding partners
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Cabinet Office
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Newcastle Gateshead Clinical Commissioning Group
Delivery Partners
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Changing Lives
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Mental Health Concern
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First Contact Clinical
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Healthworks Newcastle
Team
Collaborators & funding partners
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Cabinet Office
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Newcastle Gateshead Clinical Commissioning Group
Delivery Partners
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Changing Lives
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Mental Health Concern
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First Contact Clinical
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Healthworks Newcastle
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Mila founded and leads Bridges Outcomes Partnerships (BOP). At BOP, we work to radically improve human services and environmental initiatives to improve outcomes for people and value for society. Programmes BOP supports are dedicated to empowering people across the world to improve their lives, in areas ranging from education and wellbeing to housing, child protection, employment and environmental protection. Mila is on boards of Positive Families Partnership, Stronger Families, Forward, North East Lincolnshire Thrive, Ways to Wellness, Education Outcomes Partnerships, along with other family, employment, and refugee support focused programmes.
Mila is also a Trustee for Clore Social Leadership, organisation dedicated to providing social leaders with world class leadership development.
Prior to Bridges, Mila’s career spanned public, private, and third sector. Mila helped create and run Education Generation, a crowdsourcing social enterprise focused on enabling young leaders in low-and middle-income countries to participate in some of the world’s most forward-thinking education programmes.
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Antony is a member of the Bridges board and is actively involved in the management of the Bridges portfolio. He is also a trustee for the Bridges Impact Foundation.
Antony has over 20 years of private equity and venture capital investment experience in a wide range of businesses, from early- stage development opportunities to later-stage management buy-outs. He joined 3i in 1988 and led a number of successful MBO investments before managing 3i’s Newcastle office in 1995. He then managed 3i’s Cambridge office before leading 3i’s healthcare team, which invested in medical technology and biotechnology businesses across Europe.
Antony is a Teaching Fellow at London Business School and lectures on financing entrepreneurial business in London, Dubai and India. He is also Director of the North-East based seed fund, NorthStar Ventures, and was previously a director of two other early-stage technology spin-out funds and a founder director of the Cambridge Network.
He studied Mechanical Engineering at Bristol University and has an MBA from London Business School.
Antony was awarded an OBE for services to social enterprise and social investment in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Overview
Using social prescribing to create sustained lifestyle changes and improved self-care for people living with long-term health conditions (LTCs) in Newcastle.
BOP’s Ways to Wellness programme was an innovative initiative based on the concept of ‘social prescribing’ – the use of non-medical interventions to achieve sustained lifestyle change and improved self-care among people with long-term health conditions.
The programme enhanced patients’ abilities to manage their illness – through healthier behaviour, increased community participation and better access to specialist health services – supplementing the support they received from their healthcare professional. Participants remained on the Ways to Wellness programme for an average of 21 months, supported at all times by a dedicated ‘Link Worker’, over time improving their quality of life while also reducing the demands on NHS primary and secondary care.
After 10 years’ success, as of 18 July 2025, the Long-term Conditions project by Ways to Wellness closed following a withdrawal in funding. However, the learning from it provided the foundation upon which Ways to Wellness was able to build its varied current prototypes. Find out more at https://www.waystowellness.org.uk/projects.
Delivery innovations
The switch to outcomes-based contracting enabled a much more collaborative, flexible approach to problem-solving.
Outcomes
Over 6,600 adults with LTCs were supported to improve their wellbeing, while reducing secondary care costs by an average of 27%.
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6606
Starts to the programme
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3.8
Average points improvement in wellbeing
(Target 1.5) -
27%
Reduction in secondary care cost
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£8.5m
Outcomes achieved