Social prescribing: A narrative review of how community engagement can improve wellbeing in later life

Abstract

Social prescribing is being proposed by policy makers as a solution to primarily address lowered wellbeing and increased loneliness in older adults. Previous reviews have found a lack of supporting evidence for social prescribing. However, these reviews were using a narrow definition which may have left out some important evaluations. Therefore, this review aims to evaluate the evidence for social prescribing programs using a broader definition to encompasses a variety of referral pathways and activities. The review was conducted by searching PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, and ProQuest Social Sciences databases, and a final 77 articles were included. We found that there were five main themes in the outcomes reported: social connection; improvement in the management of health and health status; improvement in mental health and wellbeing; life enrichment; and link worker support. Social prescribing programs appeared to have generally positive impacts however there was a large variety in both programs reported and quality of the research, which made drawing definitive conclusions difficult. Researchers evaluating programs in future should attempt to recruit larger sample sizes and use a mixed methods approach to further examine the evidence base for social prescribing.