The Scottish Community Link Worker Network – giving a voice to Scotland’s Community Link Workers

In this blog, Roisin Hurst Scottish Community Link Worker Network Project Manager explores the vital role community link workers play as essential connectors between primary care, patients, and communities.

‘They ask what matters to you, not what is the matter with you.’

The quote above captures the person-centred approach that community link workers (CLWs) are taking every day to tackle health inequalities and support people to live healthier, happier lives.

Did you know that there are now over 300 CLWs working across Scotland? And approximately 80% of GP practices in Scotland now have access to a community link worker? 

CLWs help patients navigate and engage with wider non-medical services and resources in their local area. They are a crucial cog in the primary care workforce and are the ‘essential connectors’ between primary care, patients and communities.  Some of the key reasons for referral to a CLW include support for mental health, social isolation and loneliness, housing, trauma and financial issues.

To support CLWs in their role, Voluntary Health Scotland (with funding support from the Scottish Government’s Primary Care Directorate) established The Scottish Community Link Worker Network (SCLWN) in 2021.  The Network and Community of Practice enables Scotland’s CLWs to meet, share good practice and benefit from peer support.  Over the last 3 years the Network has rapidly expanded to become a thriving and active body of over 360 CLWs and programme leads.

Peer support

The Network brings together the CLWs regularly through its annual programme of online events including knowledge exchange and peer support events as well as consultations on different policy areas including adult mental health services and community and learning development. The highlight of the events calendar is the Network’s Annual Conference which brings CLWs together in-person to celebrate their work. This year’s SCLWN Conference - Health Hope and Healing will take place on 7 May 2025 in Glasgow and will feature the first awards ceremony to recognise Scotland’s  CLWs and teams that have gone above and beyond for their communities.

The SCLWN is also proud to launch a series of films which showcases the vital and highly skilled work that CLWs do in their communities. The films feature interviews with CLWs, GPs and patients who have benefited from the CLW service. In one of the videos, Peter Cairns, a GP in Wester Hailes in Edinburgh, describes CLWs as ‘transformational to our practice’ and a ‘ray of light’ for vulnerable people. In another of the films, Neil, a patient who used the CLW service in Dundee, talks about the importance of being listened to by his CLW and how much his life has changed for the better.

Essential connections

Although no one seems to dispute the need for CLWs to support early intervention and prevention in our communities, the funding landscape for them continues to be an uncertain and challenging one.  The majority of CLWs are employed by third sector organisations and since the Network’s establishment, a recurrent theme we hear from CLWs has been in relation to the lack of a clear national strategy for community link working and social prescribing; one that addresses longer-term financial sustainability for CLWs and the third sector organisations that both employ them and to whose services they refer their patients. VHS’s Essential Connections report published in 2023 explored the range and scope of community link working in Scotland. Following on from this groundbreaking research, we welcome Scottish Government’s national review of community link working in Scotland and look forward to seeing some positive outcomes from this in relation to providing long-term support to CLWs across Scotland.

In the meantime, the Scottish Community Link Worker Network continues to demonstrate the professionalism of community link workers and the positive impact they have on their patients’ lives as well as in their local communities and within primary care. We will continue to champion them and raise awareness of the vital and complex role they play in supporting patients, primary care and their local communities.

As one CLW said in our report,

‘We are not clinical but we are the missing link. Because GPs don’t have the time to do the community mapping and know everything that is out there in the community.’

For more information, please email SCLWN Project Manager Roisin Hurst.

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