The dual impact of social prescribing: targeting social determinants to enhance quality of life in chronic conditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic diseases are heavily influenced by social determinants of health (SDoH), requiring care that extends beyond medical interventions to address underlying issues. Social prescribing, which connects individuals to community resources, offers holistic care complementary to health systems. However, social prescribing requires context-specific tailoring and ongoing evaluation to meet community needs. To evaluate a 12-week social prescribing intervention targeting SDoH for individuals with, or at risk of developing chronic disease on health-related quality of life, general wellbeing, mental wellbeing, self-reported health, and healthcare utilisation. A secondary aim was to assess participant satisfaction with social prescribing. A pre-post design using de-identified data collected from an ongoing intervention. Eligibility included adults in south-east New South Wales who presented to their General Practitioner (GP) with, or at risk of, chronic disease and completed the intervention between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2024. The social prescribing model involved link workers and participants co-designing individualised plans based on their needs and interests, conducted either in-person or by telephone consultations. Outcome measures collected pre- and post-intervention included health-related quality of life, self-reported health, general wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and healthcare utilisation. The study included 281 participants (mean age 57.7 years, 66.6% female). Significant improvements were observed in health-related quality of life (p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.645), self-reported health (p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.709), general wellbeing (p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.438), and mental wellbeing (p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.723). These benefits were consistent across binary gender and age groups. A non-significant trend toward reduced healthcare utilisation was observed. Participants reported high satisfaction with the program (9.27/10), with 75% stating they would not change it and a high likelihood (9.53/10) of recommending it to others. Social prescribing addressing SDoH improved health-related quality of life, wellbeing, and self-reported health for adults with, or at risk of developing, chronic diseases. This study is the first Australian evaluation of social prescribing demonstrating benefits on general wellbeing and mental wellbeing, with future analysis planned to explore impacts among Australia’s specific cultural and linguistic groups. N/A. Many people with long-term health conditions need more than just medical treatment to feel better and improve their quality of life. While doctors focus on physical health, issues like food insecurity and loneliness can greatly affect quality of life. Social prescribing works alongside regular healthcare, by offering the opportunity to refer patients to link workers. Link workers connect participants with community services that enhance quality of life. These services can directly impact life quality—like food programs, social groups, and housing support. A key feature is that link workers and participants co-design personalised prescriptions that address multiple quality of life domains simultaneously that can include multiple community programs and services (rather than single clinical programs), enabling them to address various social determinants of health. Although this approach has shown promise internationally, we don't know if it works as well in Australia's unique setting. This study asked whether a 12-week social prescribing program could improve quality of life, health, and wellbeing for Australian adults living with or at risk of chronic diseases. We also asked whether participants were satisfied with the program. Our results showed that people had improved quality of life, better physical and mental health, and less stress and anxiety after completing the program. They also tended to use fewer healthcare services, suggesting potential cost savings. Participants reported high satisfaction with the program, with 75% stating they would not change it and were likely to recommend it to others. These findings are the first to show that social prescribing can successfully improve wellbeing and quality of life for Australians with chronic diseases, providing the opportunity for people to take better control of their health through community support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".