Project 460665

Social determinants of health (SDHs) are important social factors that affect health and include social support, housing, consistent access to food, a living income, transportation, and more. Despite the impact of SDHs on health, they are not routinely measured in many healthcare institutions across Canada and their importance is not well-known to the public. Over the past decade, there has been increasing interest in incorporating SDH screening into healthcare and using this information to prescribe social services to address SDH-related needs (i.e., social prescription) and improve patient health. One example of a social prescription program is the Health Connections program in Mendip, England which successfully reduced community emergency department visits by 14%. This program also involved community members who helped people connect with social services after social prescriptions were provided. In partnership with several community and healthcare organizations, we propose to use Quality Improvement (QI) approaches as a foundation for the co-design of an implementation and evaluation program of social prescribing at a secondary (e.g., Diabetes Clinic) and tertiary (e.g., Stroke Clinic) health care setting in the Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC). To facilitate follow-up for social prescriptions, this program will also involve a system of community volunteers who can connect patients to social services. The following objectives will be addressed by the planning phase of this project: 1) nurture collaborative and respectful partnerships with representatives of marginalized communities to enable co-development and person-focused research; 2) build a system of networking between project partners to develop an over-arching project strategy and timeline for the implementation phase, and; 3) develop a CIHR project grant application (within the Global Health Areas) to implement and evaluate our unique approach to a community-integrated social prescribing program.