Advanced Search
Background One in five general practice appointments are for social rather than medical reasons. To alleviate these pressures on primary care, NHS England mandated the national roll-out of social prescribing link workers in July 2019.
Aim To access whether the national roll-out of social prescribing link workers reduced GP appointments.
Method We use electronic healthcare records (Clinical Practice Research Datalink) of 15.7 million patients across 1461 practices in England from 2016 to 2021, representing around 28% of England’s population. We create a patient-level quarterly panel dataset (T = 22, N = approx. 240 million) containing counts of appointments with a GP and interactions with social prescribing link workers identified via specific SNOMED codes. We adopted a staggered difference-in-difference approach, where we have treated, not yet treated, and never treated patients for each time point. Patients can be referred (treated) to the NHS Social Prescribing Scheme from Q3 of 2019 onwards (t = 16). We omit 226 practices that implemented separate social prescribing programmes prior to national rollout.
Results Patients referred to social prescribing subsequently have 1.13 fewer appointments per quarter with a GP (95% CI = −1.21 to −1.03) than those not referred. There was a total of 244 626 freed-up appointments with a GP linked to social prescribing referrals.
Conclusion Early analysis of the national roll-out of social prescribing link workers has demonstrated that NHS England has met its intended aim of reducing GP appointments. This has the potential to reduce pressures on primary care by addressing patients’ social needs.
Members, please Login at RCGP to access the journal online
Enter your BJGP login information below.
Pay Per Article - You may access this article (from the computer you are currently using) for 1 day for US$35.00
Regain Access - You can regain access to a recent Pay per Article purchase if your access period has not yet expired.
Thank you for recommending British Journal of General Practice.
NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person to whom you are recommending the page knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.
British Journal of General Practice
