Abstract
Social prescribing (SP) refers patients to community and social services that sup-port the individual’s social needs and that can bolster their overall health and well-being. SP offers a promising approach to addressing wide-spread mental health issues, social determinants of health, and growing social isolation. While SP is integrated into the national health systems of countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Japan, it has only recently begun to take root in the United States (US). This paper presents “Design for Social Prescribing”, a re-search project led by the Design Laboratory at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that explored how the structured use of design could help expand and accelerate the SP in the US. The research was structured on advanced design models to support multi-stakeholder collaboration in three phases. This paper outlines key learnings from these phases, including their processes, approaches, and outcomes.
Keywords
social prescribing; systems design; health promotion; well-being; multi-stakeholder collaboration
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.707
Citation
Nogueira, A., Shukla, R., and Sook Park, M. (2024) Design for social prescribing: bridging silos for health promotion, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.707
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Design for social prescribing: bridging silos for health promotion
Social prescribing (SP) refers patients to community and social services that sup-port the individual’s social needs and that can bolster their overall health and well-being. SP offers a promising approach to addressing wide-spread mental health issues, social determinants of health, and growing social isolation. While SP is integrated into the national health systems of countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Japan, it has only recently begun to take root in the United States (US). This paper presents “Design for Social Prescribing”, a re-search project led by the Design Laboratory at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that explored how the structured use of design could help expand and accelerate the SP in the US. The research was structured on advanced design models to support multi-stakeholder collaboration in three phases. This paper outlines key learnings from these phases, including their processes, approaches, and outcomes.