| アブストラクト | 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. |
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| ジャーナル名 | The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners |
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| Pubmed追加日 | 2025/5/23 |
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| 投稿者 | Wilding, Anna; Agboraw, Efundem; Munford, Luke; Sutton, Matt; Wildman, John; Beeson, Morgan; Mercer, Stewart; Wilson, Paul |
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| 組織名 | University of Manchester anna.wilding@manchester.ac.uk.;University of Manchester.;University of Manchester and Monash University.;Newcastle University.;University of Edinburgh. |
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| Pubmed リンク | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/40404430/ |
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