Mapping, guiding, and assessing social prescription services in the UK: Kerryn Husk

The use of non-health service referral, or ’social prescribing’ interventions have been proposed as a cost-effective alternative to help those with long-term conditions manage their illness and improve health and well-being. We are generating theory through review and primary data collection relating to the social prescribing system, how to maximise the benefits of this system and how it might be implemented.A realist synthesis and evaluation. Working with three UK case-sites who are all at various stages in the process of setting up social prescription services, we are conducting patient pathway analyses, focus groups, and interviews. An important component of this work is iterative, targeted reviews of the literature relating to these pathways and identified mechanisms to assess effectiveness and reach.The study is ongoing; however, we are testing prototype theory generated in a previous realist review (presented last year) and elaborating on which mechanisms within each pathway relate to suitable population types and aspects of wellbeing.We aim to draw together service delivery practitioners, users, researchers and clinicians to create specified theory for setting up social prescription services. This guidance will be context sensitive and make recommendations for increasing acceptability and spread of complex system service delivery and interventions.We are building highly specified, context sensitive system specification and ‘lessons learned’ implementation guidance for social prescribing programmes in the UK.We are producing these outputs through collaborative partnerships with services delivering programmes as they develop, using realist evaluation and qualitative comparative methods.