Authors: Wells, Morgan, and Zurynski.
Overview
This paper is for attendees at the Social Prescribing Roundtable to be held at RACGP House in East Melbourne on Monday 25 November 2019.
The roundtable will be co-hosted by the Consumers Health Forum of Australia (CHF) and The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) in partnership with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Partnership Centre on Health System Sustainability.
The roundtable is supported by funding from the Australian Government Department of Health, the National Mental Health Commission and Capital Health Network.
This stimulus paper covers the basic issues around social prescribing, including:
• defining the concept of social prescribing
• examples of social prescribing happening internationally and locally
• the agenda for primary care reform in Australia and the potential benefits of social prescribing in that context.
While there are several definitions of ‘social prescribing’, to stimulate this discussion we will use the King’s Fund definition as a useful starting point. The King’s Fund defines social prescribing as ‘a means of enabling GPs, nurses and other primary care professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services.’1 The roundtable will provide a forum to build on and refine this definition so it can be operationalised in the Australian context.
This was a short summary of the original article
which can be downloaded in full as a PDF below