Who are Warm Wales?
Warm Wales are one of the oldest community interest companies working to tackle fuel poverty. Warm Wales offers both free advice and support across Wales and South West England to ensure everyone is living in warmer and safer homes.
At Warm Wales their work brings together energy advice, support, and social prescribing to improve people’s health outcomes by understanding the root causes.
They started to be recognised for their work in 2010, but they weren’t fully established in South Wales until 2017. Now their aim is to broaden their project further across North Wales to combat fuel poverty and promote affordable living.
Warm Wales’ journey with Access Elemental Social Prescribing
Prior to using Access Elemental Social Prescribing, Warm Wales used Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. This helped Warm Wales check support was being provided to individuals that needed it, but it didn’t look at the impact which the support provided was having.
Warm Wales wanted to go one step further than this and selected Access Elemental Social Prescribing because our fully flexible referral pathways would help Warm Wales track individual health journeys from start to finish.
They started working with us in 2020 where our social prescribing software made it easier to track and analyse improvements in individuals’ health through analysing different wellbeing scores and presenting all the information in one centralised place.
What is Warm Wales’ feedback on our social prescribing software?
Outcomes:
1. Sharing findings
Since working with us at Access Elemental Social Prescribing, Warm Wales have been able to be able to track health journeys in more detail, to demonstrate to other housing associations the impact their advice and support is having on the community.
Warm Wales knows and understands the impact a cold home can have on someone’s physical and mental health. Their work concentrates on looking at all these issues holistically to make a real positive impact for the long term.
In order to do this they concentrate on three main steps:
- Making sure all homes and nice and warm
- Assessing the health and safety of a home e.g. carbon monoxide levels and fire safety
- Maximising the service user’s income
Through Warm Wales being able to document individuals’ journeys from start to finish they have been able to highlight to housing associations that unless these three key areas are addressed and supported, wellbeing will not improve to the same level it could do in the long term.
Since using Access Elemental Warm Wales have had the evidence to prove this by demonstrating how wellbeing scores have improved since people started using their service. This has helped start and continue the conversations in Wales about the importance of looking at all the wider issues that could be impacting someone’s health and wellbeing and that until those issues are addressed, issues will never be fully resolved.
We are going through difficult times and we are here to help and to provide advice and support to those who need a helping hand. We know that this is a worrying time but my friendly and knowledgeable team will do what they can to help make things a little easier. I have known about Elemental for a while now and we are very excited to now be using it and it’s all as a result of the partnership working that we have with Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board. The fact that we can already see the benefits of using the digital platform is amazing – we are so excited to see the impact results.
2. Gained more projects
One of the most exciting outcomes Warm Wales have experienced through being able to share health journeys and the positive impact their services are having on communities, is that more charities and organisations have been wanting to work with them.
This has also encouraged more Health Boards and Housing Associations to get on board and work collaboratively with Warm Wales to help make more of a difference.
For example, Warm Wales have recently signed a project with Newport City Homes which both the Health Board and Dragons Rugby Team are willing to get involved with to help ensure everyone is living in warmer and safer homes despite the difficulties from the cost of living crisis.
Warm Wales are also now working with other communities on smaller projects too to ensure as much help and support can be provided across both North and South Wales during these difficult times.
Our new Welsh Government energy advice pilot, looking at providing support to residents who are at risk of or who are in fuel poverty in Gwynedd Caerphilly and Ceredigion and beyond. It’s really exciting to be part of that consortium that is made up of 12 partners and it’s fab that we can bring so many organisations together to be able to help residents.
3. Improvement in Wellbeing and great service user feedback
One of the other major benefits Warm Wales have experienced since they started working with us at Access Elemental is being able to present all their data and customer achievements in one place to show to other housing associations the benefits tacking fuel poverty can have on individuals and their community.
Since they started working with us, Warm Wales have received over 4200 referrals and held over 7,600 interventions to help individuals tackle fuel poverty, ensure they are living in warm and safe homes, and help prevent homelessness.
Through investing in ways to mitigate poor housing Warm Wales have seen a staggering £521,000 return on investment. The individuals that have seeked help through Warm Wales no longer visit the GP or hospital as regularly for respiratory or cardiorespiratory conditions and instead have been able to experience an improvement in their wellbeing. In fact 71% of individuals feel happier and 74% have had reduced anxiety now Warm Wales have helped them overcome their housing issues.
From these improvements in wellbeing scores they have also been able to receive great feedback from their clients too:
I was in a situation with no money and pregnant. I did not know how I could get help to put money in the meter until someone gave me Warm Wales’ number. Being able to put the heating on and boil the kettle for a warm drink helped a lot.
Customer Feedback at Warm Wales
Being able to heat the house for longer eased my depression and I did not have to worry how much it was costing me.
Customer Feedback at Warm Wales
Working with us at Access Elemental therefore has made it easier for Warm Wales to track and present all the outcomes of their hard work to ensure all citizens across Wales are living in warmer, safer, and more comfortable homes.
Not only has this helped Warm Wales promote the great work they have been able to achieve with other housing associations across the local area but it also helps to encourage other housing organisations and local authorities to do the same and the issues surrounding fuel poverty, cost-of-living crisis, and homelessness continues.
The future:
It is clear that as the issues from the Cost of Living Crisis continue, so do issues surrounding housing and individuals being able to afford to live in a warm and safe home.
Through working with us, Warm Wales are continuing to work hard on getting the messages heard and want to make sure questions about the home are involved in every conversation about health and wellbeing.
This will then make it easier and quicker for a referral to be sent through our social prescribing platform, so all organisations that use our software can use it more productively to make better use of the resources available within their community.
This will allow Warm Wales to bring together homes and health and make wider stakeholders realise the correlation between the two, so that more funding can be secured to help improve communities even further.
For more information discover how our digital social prescribing platform can help track your service users’ social prescribing journeys to provide evidence and help show the importance of combatting wider social determinants of health to improve your community’s wellbeing in the long term.
Download our housing guide today and learn more about how social prescribing can help in housing.
Contact us today and lets work together on making the residents in your local community maximise their income so they can be warmer, safer, and happier in their homes.
