Social Prescribing Observatory

NHS England created a consensus Common Outcomes Framework (COF) for social prescribing in 2019 and recommended the use of two codes to capture social prescribing activity: “referral to social prescribing service” and “social prescribing declined”.  In collaboration with NHS England, we developed the Social Prescribing Observatory to capture social prescribing activity across England.

The Social Prescribing Observatory is updated weekly and provides information on social prescribing referrals and declines broken down by the attributes listed above as well as by ICS. The Social Prescribing Heatmaps provide an England-wide view of social prescribing activity broken down by ICS level.

Social Needs Observatory

It is well established that 80-90% of health outcomes are linked to social determinants of health. These include health-related behaviours (e.g. tobacco use, alcohol use, diet & exercise, etc.), socioeconomic factors (e.g. education, job status, family/social support, income, etc.) and environmental factors (e.g. air quality, water quality, etc.).  It is also well established that ~20% of patients go to their general practitioner for primarily social problems.

To define social need, we used several key concepts derived from the “Five Ways to Wellbeing” model proposed by the New Economics Foundation as well as Wilkinson and Marmot’s work on social determinants of health.  Our long list included several indicators which we then checked within SNOMED to determine if concepts with appropriate semantic tags were available.  This yielded eight indicators with categories and theme variables as listed in the table at the bottom of this page.

Social Prescribing Interventions Observatory

For the Social Prescribing Interventions Observatory, we built on work we have done previously exploring the use of ontologies to capture more granular information on the actual social prescription individuals have been referred to.  We have defined five social prescribing intervention indicators based on appropriate SNOMED concepts and semantic tags:

• Health education offered
• Referral to benefits agency
• Referral To Physical Activity
• Social Prescribing For Mental Health
• Referral to Arts Therapy Services

We aim to expand this list in the future to other intervention types.