England’s social prescribing programme, which prioritises nature, art, sport, and community, has blown past official targets, with more than one million referrals per year, a new study found.
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Doctors in England refer more than one million patients every year to gardening clubs, music groups, housing support, and other non-medical activities to boost their wellbeing, a new analysis has found.
Collectively known as social prescribing, these activities support patients grappling with social problems that affect their health – loneliness, grief, finances, housing, employment, or anything else.
Doctors refer these patients to “link workers” who help them create plans to address these barriers, for example, by having a socially isolated person spend time with others in nature.
Advocates have long pushed social prescribing as a strategy to boost patient outcomes, lower medical costs, and relieve pressure on the health system – and in 2019, the National Health Service (NHS) committed to rolling out this approach across primary care clinics in England.
At the time, the NHS said it hoped that 900,000 patients would be referred to these programmes by 2023-2024.
The new study shows it has far exceeded that target. An estimated 9.4 million general practitioner (GP) visits involved social prescribing through 2023, leading to 5.5 million referrals.
The findings underscore “what a fundamental and important service social prescribing now is within the NHS,” Daisy Fancourt, one of the study’s authors and head of the UK’s National Centre for Social Prescribing Data and Analysis, said in a statement.
The UK has one of the world’s most advanced social prescribing systems, but the movement has also spread to more than 30 countries across the globe.
The study, published in The Lancet Public Health journal, is the first in a series that will assess social prescribing’s effectiveness in England.
Researchers analysed the medical records of 1.2 million patients from more than 1,700 medical practices, using this data to estimate social prescribing’s reach across the country.
More than 3,300 link workers, who are considered integral to these programmes’ success, are now employed across England, the study found.
“Link workers deal with the complicated, knotty problems that have such a big impact on our health, whether that’s sleepless nights and headaches because of debt, or depression and loneliness after a bereavement,” said Charlotte Osborn-Forde, chief executive of the National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP), a nonprofit that promotes the practice in the UK.
The study also identified a thorny challenge for social prescribing programmes: While a growing number of referrals are from ethnic minority groups and from England’s most deprived areas, “persistent sociodemographic disparities” remain.
An ongoing research project in the European Union aims to identify how well the approach works to improve health for refugees and immigrants, older adults who live alone, and LGBTQ people.
