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Abstract
BackgroundNon-clinical health interventions provided by the voluntary and community sector can improve patients’ health and well-being and reduce pressure on primary and secondary care, but only if patients adhere to them. This study provides novel insights into the impact of doctor referrals to such services, known as social prescribing, on patients’ adherence to them.MethodsUsing a negative binomial model, we analysed electronic visitor records from a community health advice and navigation service in Germany between January 2018 and December 2019 to determine whether social prescribing was associated with greater adherence to the service (measured in terms of return visits) compared to patients who self-referred. We also explored whether this effect differed according to patient characteristics.ResultsBased on 1734 observations, we found that social prescribing was significantly associated with a greater number of return visits compared to patient self-referrals (p < 0.05). For patients who visited the service because of psychological concerns, the effect of social prescribing was lower. For all other patient characteristics, the effect remained unchanged, suggesting relevance to all other patient groups.ConclusionsThe results of our study indicate that social prescribing may be an effective way to facilitate adherence to non-clinical community and voluntary sector health services. This knowledge is important for policy makers who are deciding whether to implement or expand upon social prescribing schemes.
Highlights
Non-clinical health interventions provided by the voluntary and community sector can improve patients’ health and well-being and reduce pressure on primary and secondary care, but only if patients adhere to them
For patients with a referral, the information on diagnosis or suspected disease and treatment recommendation/plan provided by the General practitioner (GP)/specialist on the referral form is considered in this step
The first column contains the incidence rate ratios (IRR) for a model without control variables; the second column contains the results of the full model including the control variables
Summary
Non-clinical health interventions provided by the voluntary and community sector can improve patients’ health and well-being and reduce pressure on primary and secondary care, but only if patients adhere to them. In socially deprived areas, many patients present with concerns that arise from their personal and social circumstances [1,2,3] While such circumstances often affect the management of long-term medical conditions [3], the complex social, mental and physical problems they entail often cannot be dealt with effectively by GPs alone and require community and voluntary sector resources [4, 5]. Non-clinical health services provided by community or voluntary sector organisations can help relieve GPs’ workload, reduce inequalities in health care and improve patients’ health and quality of life [6,7,8,9,10,11]. Examples of support include management of mental health, advice on weight and long-term conditions, art therapy, learning/employment assistance and exercise classes [11]
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