JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social loneliness is a prevalent issue in industrialized countries that can lead to adverse health outcomes, including a 26% increased risk of premature mortality, coronary heart disease, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease. The UK government has implemented a strategy called A Connected Society, which includes social prescribing, a healthcare model where primary care physicians prescribe non-pharmacological interventions in partnership with local communities to address social loneliness. The UK government has allocated Link Workers to help users access social prescribing initiatives easily, and the interventions are expanding globally. Despite efforts to evaluate their effectiveness, healthcare professionals and policymakers have stressed the lack of strong evidence, indicating a need for evidence-based plans to disseminate social prescribing worldwide.

Objective:

This study aims to identify global trends in social prescribing since its introduction in 2018 in the UK.

Methods:

Google’s searchable data were collected to analyze online data related to social prescribing. With the help of web crawling, 3,796 news items were collected for the five-year period from 2018 to 2022. Key topics were selected to identify keywords for each major topic related to social prescribing. The topics were grouped into four categories, namely of Health, Program, Governance, and Target, and keywords for each topic were selected thereafter. Text mining was used to determine the importance of words collected from new data.

Results:

Word clouds were generated for words related to social prescribing collected from news between 2018 and 2022. Words such as Health, Prescribing, and GPs were highest in terms of frequency in the list for all the years. Between 2020 and 2021, COVID, gardening, and UK were found to be highly-related words. In 2022, NHS and UK ranked high.

Conclusions:

The purpose of this study is to identify global trends in social prescribing over a five-year period from 2018 and 2022 and analyze the related words applying the identified key topics to provide evidence for implementing social prescribing.Social prescribing is gaining global acceptance and is becoming a global national policy, as the world is witnessing a sharp rise in the aging population, non-contagious diseases, and mental health problems. A successful and sustainable model of social prescribing can be achieved by introducing social prescribing schemes based on the understanding of roles and the impact of multi-sectoral partnerships.