by Hadil Alfares and Maureen Ashe
Social prescribing is a health and social model of care which aims to address a person’s unmet non-medical social needs. Testing the effect of social prescribing, provides insights to its effect or impact on a person’s wellbeing, and the wider community. There is a need to understand what and how we measure (outcome measures) to understand the impact of social prescribing.
Knowledge gap: Our goal was to review the literature to understand outcome measures for social prescribing for adults. We searched and reviewed the outcomes (tools or questionnaires) reported in published studies. We identified 10 systematic reviews and 33 primary studies which met our criteria. We then sorted the outcomes we found into topics based on a published taxonomy (Dodd et al., 2018).
Findings : Most studies we located included outcomes or measures like well-being, but fewer of the included studies reported on caregivers, volunteers, and cognition. Almost all studies reported basic participant demographics, but many without detailed information.
Next steps for this project are to gather diverse perspectives on “what matters most” in social prescribing by conducting a modified Delphi process (Esfandiari et al., 2023). We hope to receive input from others to make sure the outcomes used in social prescribing are relevant and meaningful.
Ashe MC, Dos Santos IK, Alfares H, Chudyk AM, Esfandiari E. Outcomes and instruments used in social prescribing: a modified umbrella review. Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada. 2024 Jun;44(6):244-269.
Esfandiari E, Chudyk AM, Grover S, Lau EY, Hoppmann C, Mortenson WB, Mulligan K, Newton C, Pauly T, Pitman B, Rush KL, Sakakibara BM, Symes B, Tsuei S, Petrella RJ, Ashe MC. Social Prescribing Outcomes for Trials (SPOT): Protocol for a modified Delphi study on core outcomes. PLOS One. 2023 May 16;18(5):e0285182.
Dodd S, Clarke M, Becker L, Mavergames C, Fish R, Williamson PR. A taxonomy has been developed for outcomes in medical research to help improve knowledge discovery. J Clin Epidemiol. 2018 Apr;96:84-92.
