by Hadil Alfares and Maureen Ashe
Social prescribing is an integrated health and social model of care which aims to address a person’s unmet non-medical social needs. Evaluating interventions or programs, such as 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 the effect and impact of social prescribing.
Our goal was to bridge a knowledge gap by reviewing existing published studies to determine what is currently measured in social prescribing for adults (aged 18 years and older) in both research and practice. In this process, we searched for and reviewed the outcomes (tools or questionnaires) that were reported in published studies. We identified 10 systematic reviews and 33 primary studies on social prescribing which met our criteria, and sorted the outcomes we found into core areas and domains according to a published taxonomy (Dodd et al., 2018).
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 few studies provided detailed information.
Our 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). In this way, we hope to receive input from others to make sure the outcomes used in social prescribing are relevant and meaningful to people who can impact, or are impacted, by social prescribing.
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.
