Introducing the Social Prescribing USA Monthly Newsletter

September 2022 Issue #1

After much demand, we are finally starting a social prescribing USA newsletter! 

More and more people are reaching out to us every week, eager to get involved in social prescribing. We can barely keep up, so this newsletter aims to be the Social Prescribing USA Public Town Square - a central place to coordinate our growing movement. We’ll share insights from the network, philosophy on advancing the movement, and act as an idea factory of insights. This newsletter will be co-created with the brave leaders shaping this practice nationally.

The US social prescribing movement is picking up! A few landmark events have happened in the past months:

• Time magazine - Time Magazine Health wrote a story and mentioned our movement on the cover of their summer edition. Most excitingly, the piece was written by Rachel Chen, a Harvard student who started the first US college social prescribing club and later worked to help Cleveland Clinic set up their pilot! Our network is already creating synergies.

• Global developments paper in British Medical Journal- Our director, Dan Morse, was the co-lead author of a journal article on the growing movement in 17 countries. This gives academic credence to the movement and insights into the various models which are adapting around the world. This is truly an international movement.

• Support from international partners - We are working alongside and getting support from a slew of international social prescribing organizations, including the United Nations and WHO’s Global Social Prescribing Alliance, the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing and the UK’s Social Prescribing Network. We’ll share our collective insights in this newsletter.

Most importantly, implementation in the US is being led by people on this newsletter like you – from therapy calls in Utah, to geriatric offices in Cleveland, to nonprofit leaders in Arkansas, to leaders giving prescriptions for museum visits in Massachusetts and parks in Northern California. Our efforts and collective wisdom will grow as our network expands.

The UK’s social prescribing movement, which now has widespread implementation in every health center in the UK, also started as a grassroots effort. It was physicians and the volunteer and community sector who collaborated to create something better and ultimately won over the National Health Service. Today, we are planting the seeds for wide-scale implementation in the US. We have the potential to transform not only healthcare, but also our country’s culture around health, creativity and the arts, nature, and volunteering.

We are also creating a new network, Social Prescribing USA, to advance this work. We plan to run this newsletter, host Zoom happy hours to bring together people interested in SP, support those who want to advance the research, and help them implement social prescribing in their local area.

Send us your questions and your obstacles! We’d love to share it with our network.

Tell us your wins. We’d love to celebrate them.

We have links at the bottom of this newsletter to share your experience and barriers as well as your interest in SP for future newsletters.

Let’s do this together!

Movement Making: the Chicken and Egg Problem

A.k.a. What’s the best way to advance our movement?

Creating change in healthcare is a chicken and egg problem.

There’s an interdependent triangle between the factors needed to eventually create system change. The graphic below outlines how the trio of evidence-adoption-public interests that all rely on each other to advance, and are equally blocked by each other's progress. Watch video summary of this graphic here.

Where do we start to advance social prescribing? Should we 1) pursue pilot study funding to generate evidence that could convince health care systems to adopt SP or 2) should we first recruit a visionary set of health system leaders to adopt SP and study them or 3) should we generate excitement in the general public and social sector organizations to collaborate with health systems as was done in the UK?

Our answer is another option … growing a network of leaders to work on 1, 2, and 3. We can create an ecosystem that can advance all areas. All we need is a bit of structure and hands willing to dig in and make things happen.  This is the topic of our next newsletter.

Insights & Shout Outs

• Resources for SP: NYC program pulls in the parks department to help achieve their “accessibility goals”. Gillian Fallon, in partnership with the New York Memory Center, is piloting a nature prescription program for people living with dementia and their care partners in New York City.  As Gillian starts to explore sustainable models, she is interested in pursuing partnerships with organizations such as the NYC Parks department around shared accessibility goals that will enable more people to make use of public parks and green spaces.

• Scaling volunteer prescriptions nationally through State Service Commissions: It is hard to find scaled infrastructure to support volunteering prescriptions nationally. Every state, however, does have a volunteering commission. These may be a solid infrastructure of “volunteering centers” that any clinic in a major city could plug into to implement social prescribing. We are utilizing this commission in Ohio to connect patients at Cleveland Clinic via Greater Cleveland Volunteers.

• Grant to build a model:  Social Prescribing USA has secured a small grant from the California Health Care Foundation to build a sustainable model for SP within a county/community health system, build community partnerships, and write a problem/solution white paper. The next steps will include finding matching funds to complete a demonstration project. Let us know if you’d like to be involved.

Events

• Social Prescribing Community of Practice on Zoom, Oct 4th, 6:30-7:30pm ET - Join us for a collaborative one-hour Zoom call with people interested in or actively implementing social prescribing. A great group has already signed up! We will share best practices, barriers, and ideas to support each other's work. Email Dan at dfmorse23@gmail.com to join.

• Webinar with two international SP leaders 10/4 8am EST - two veterans of social prescribing, Kate Mulligan (director of CISP and major driver of Canada’s movement) and Chris Drinkwater (led a massive social impact bond SP project in England), share their insights into how to gain sustainable funding and facilitate cross-sector collaboration.

• CHC 2022 Convening, Oct 10-11th - One of our country’s leading Arts in Health conferences is being hosted by the University of Florida in Orlando. The focus is on advancing this work at the intersection of the arts, public health, equity, and community development.

• NOAH conference November 15th (virtual day) - Social Prescribing USA and two other groups will share examples of their programs and progress within the US on SP at NOAH’s Annual Conference (National Organization for Arts in Health). NOAH will also be holding its in-person conference November 2-3 in Baltimore.

Research & Media

• Research: UK’s NASP Evidence Summaries include summaries on:

  • Measuring outcomes for social prescribing in the UK

  • The economic impact of social prescribing (includes ROI)

  • Funding models in the UK

  • Who is and isn’t being referred to social prescribing?

  • Accessibility of social prescribing schemes in England to people from Black, Asian, and ethnically diverse population groups.  

  • Mental Health and social prescribing 

• Research: Epi Arts Lab includes studies in the U.S. on the use of the arts, and the strong benefits of the arts in adolescents, young adults, and elderly patients.

• Media - Podcast: Interview with our director Dan Morse on the philosophy, practice, and strategy of advancing the SP movement (50 min)

• Media - Podcast: Social Prescribing with Jill Sonke, Arts for the Health of It Podcast (45 min). Explores the impact of arts and cultural engagement on population health outcomes in the US and shares the impact of SP in the UK and what her team is hoping to achieve in the U.S.  

• Job posting: by Mass Cultural Council for a Social Prescription Strategic Consultant

Call for Content & building our network

Want to add your story and/or challenges around social prescribing for future newsletters? Click here.

Want to share your personal interest, efforts, and successes in social prescribing with our growing network? Click here.

Social Prescribing USA is led by Director Dan Morse, Medical Director Dr. Alan Siegel, and Co-Founder Delia Beck.