Early access to money and welfare rights advice has a positive impact on individual health and wellbeing.
What are Welfare Advice and Health Partnerships (WAHPs)?
WAHPs provide access to money and rights advice in health care. This is achieved by embedding advice workers in health settings and providing consensual access to medical records.
WAHPs provide a simple, effective, person-centred approach to tackling health inequalities, improving individual health and well-being and producing cost-savings for the public sector. By providing advice services in a non-stigmatised setting, they offer a delivery model which supports earlier intervention and engages individuals who would not usually use ‘traditional’ advice services.
How do WAHPs work?
There is an extensive body of evidence that proves the integration of advice and health services has multiple benefits for funders and providers of health and advice services and individual service users/ patients. WAHPs enable health services to focus on clinical needs, address health inequalities, offer an early intervention approach and enable advice agencies to engage with client groups who would not otherwise access their services.
This video explains how they work in practice, and we hear stories from three clients about the impact the service has had on their lives.
The role of the Improvement Service
The IS offers resources and support to help develop WAHPs which includes access to the Welfare Advice Service Facilitator (WASF) whose remit is to set up welfare advice and health partnerships within healthcare settings.
Funded by Scottish Government, the Improvement Service works in collaboration with NHS Scotland and the Scottish Public Health Network to provide support. The initiative offers advice and support to local authority and third sector advice agencies, Health and Social Care Partnerships, and health services which are interested in developing welfare advice and health partnerships.
In 2024 the Improvement Service published an interim evaluation of the WAHP programme ‘test and learn’ phase. For a summary, see this infographic of its key findings.
The story so far
With Scottish Government investment of more than £4 million, WAHPs have put dedicated advisers into 180 GP practices in some of Scotland’s most deprived and rural areas.
They were launched in September 2021, to embed welfare rights officers into150 GP practices and provide service users/patients with advice on increasing income, social security eligibility, debt resolution and housing and employability issues. In the autumn of 2022, it was announced that these would be extended to a further 30 GP practices; 20 rural and 10 island communities.
Read more about this on the Scottish Government website at:
- Welfare Advice and Health Partnerships, 19 March 2021
- Money and welfare advice from GP practices, 22 July 2022
- Related: Financial advice where people need it, 13 August 2023
Phone: 07841 572919