Could "Creative Health Link Workers" be the missing role in Neighbourhood Health Centres?
Neighbourhood Health Centres – geographic hubs designed to bring clinical and non-clinical support together under one roof – are fast becoming the flagship delivery model of the Government's 10 Year Health Plan for England, with prevention, personalisation and community connection at their core. But if these centres are going to offer something genuinely new, rather than just relabelling existing services, they need new roles and frameworks to match their ambition.
In a new paper for the Journal of Integrated Care, Dr Jane Hearst, Honorary Research Fellow on the Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities programme, explores the option of integrating specialist Mental Health or Creative Health Link Workers who make use of the Creative Health Communication Framework (CHCF).
The problem: social prescribing without a shared language
In her article, Jane argues that social prescribing already offers a route into non-clinical, community-based support, and that the evidence for its impact is strong. But link workers routinely report low confidence in referring into creative and community provision. Without recognised job titles or an arts-on-prescription referral framework to lean on, it can be hard to judge whether a person and a service are actually a good fit. This negatively affects members of the public whose distress doesn't sit neatly inside a mental health diagnosis, along with those experiencing health inequalities. Jane warns that inconsistent, champion-led creative referral pathways risk deepening the inequalities they're meant to close.
The solution: use of the CHCF in Neighbourhood Health Centres
The paper sets out a conceptual case for embedding specialist Link Worker roles which carry the depth of knowledge to guide personalised, relational referrals into creative provisions. It suggests that:
- these roles are embedded in Neighbourhood Health Centres, as part of multi-disciplinary teams working alongside primary care, community mental health and the voluntary sector;
- that training pathways and peer networks are built so the roles are sustainable;
- that the roles are equipped with frameworks like the CHCF to improve referral quality and reduce the risk of mismatched, low-trust referrals.
Jane outlines the requirements needed to action test-and-learn pilots across different systems – using a feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy/effectiveness approach – and finishes with a set of recommendations for Neighbourhood Health leaders across England.
Read the full paper: https://doi.org/10.1108/JICA-07-2025-0067
How to cite: Hearst, J. (2026). Mental health link workers in neighbourhood care: a theoretical application of the creative health communication framework. Journal of Integrated Care, [online] pp.1–13. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/JICA-07-2025-0067.
