The Asset Based Health Inquiry: How best to develop social prescribing

Phrases like ‘social prescribing’ and ‘coproduction’ speak to missing elements from mainstream healthcare – the need for broader than pharmacological solutions (social prescribing) and for sharing the responsibilities for maintaining and recovering health (coproduction). Neither of these approaches have yet been able to make the required impact on mainstream health services. The social prescribing initiative set out under the NHS long-term plan that is now being put into practice by NHS England (2019), is in some respects a vindication of our approach, developed by the Health Systems Innovation Lab at LSBU, where we have studied and promoted more humane approaches to healthcare, working closely with many of the pioneers of social prescribing in the UK. But on closer examination, we were not quite so sure the match was complete. Some of the key people who have developed the most important social innovations in primary care were nervous about it. It was not clear whether they were nervous about the language of ‘social prescribing’ or about the organisation of social prescribing, as set out in NHS policy. We organised this brief Inquiry in order to find out