Why Does ‘Place’ Matter for Social Prescribing?

This blog by Emilie McSwiggan, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, explores the relevance of understanding ‘places and communities’ for social prescribing, and how this has been reflected in social prescribing research so far.

Places and Communities Matter for Health

The places and communities we live in can make a real difference to our health and wellbeing. This principle underpins social prescribing, which involves connecting people to community groups and resources that can help to meet our physical and mental health needs.

But what happens to social prescribing, if community resources are limited or unavailable in the places we live? This is an important question to be asking right now, because voluntary and public sector services keep facing funding cuts, forcing some to close and others to scale back their projects or their opening hours.

This is not an equal problem. Past research has shown that communities affected by poverty, already impacted by unfair and avoidable inequalities, have fewer community resources to begin with, and also tend to bear the brunt of funding cuts to the voluntary and community sector.

For people like me, who study social prescribing, these differences between places – the inequalities in terms of the community resources available, and what it’s like to live there – are important to explore. We need to understand how this might affect the way social prescribing is provided, and people’s ability to receive and benefit from it.

Is Place in Focus in Social Prescribing Research?

I’ve recently completed a review of academic papers on social prescribing, together with my PhD supervisors. We looked at ‘literature reviews’ – these are papers which bring together multiple studies that share a common theme (like, what nature-based activities contribute to our health? Or, what barriers do people face to accessing social prescribing?). Literature reviews are often carried out when academics are planning a new research study, or bringing together evidence for decision-makers – so they’re good indications of what questions are a priority for researchers, funders and policy-makers.

At the time of our research, in February 2025, we found 97 published literature reviews about social prescribing. We read them all to find out if they focused on the places and communities where social prescribing happens. We found that this wasn’t the main focus for any of the reviews – but this focus on ‘place’ is definitely starting to emerge, as about a third of the papers addressed some aspect of ‘place’ alongside their main focus.

How do Researchers Think About Place?

Some of the reviews talked about place as something healing or health-creating – particularly those that focused on green- or nature-based social prescribing. Others explored more difficult aspects, such as the barriers which mean not everyone can enjoy the same places equally. Inaccessibility, fears of unsafety, and experiences of discrimination, mean that people who are socially marginalised often also feel excluded from places that others can enjoy.

A couple of reviews wrote about how deprivation affects the resources available in different places. They reflected that ‘place’ is not just a neutral setting, but something that interacts with our health and wellbeing. The insecurity of short-term funding and service cuts could even worsen the mental health problems that social prescribing is trying to improve.

Our notion of ‘place’ as a physical concept was also challenged by several reviews which explored digital- and phone-based ideas of community; reflecting the importance of having spaces to belong, even if you do not or cannot take part in your physical community.

Finally, we found a number of reviews which have developed useful frameworks for thinking about social prescribing as an intervention with lots of layers – from the one-to-one interactions between people who receive and provide social prescribing; to the organisational contexts (often, but not only, in GP practices) where this takes place; to the relationships between social prescribing and community organisations. If these frameworks were nudged open just a little further, they could also encompass the places or neighbourhoods where social prescribing happens – something which would make it much easier for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to bring these important concepts closer together.

Where Next?

Our research is just a small drop in the ever-growing field of social prescribing research and practice. But I hope it can play a part in opening up a conversation about these really important interactions between social prescribing policy, and the policies and funding decisions which affect voluntary and community services.

For me, it’s the start of a research process, exploring how social prescribing and community organisations negotiate the challenges of deprivation. I’m doing research in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with a small number of local communities facing high levels of health inequalities, and I’m really grateful to everyone I’ve met so far who has helped me to develop that research. This is part of a PhD project which has about another year to run, so I hope to be able to share some more concrete findings from it in the next few months, which I hope may be useful to practitioners and researchers with an interest in community health and place-based inequalities.

Our paper is available to read online, for free, at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/hsc/9920046. I also have a spreadsheet of all the included reviews, which I am very happy to share if it is useful! I am very happy to discuss your thoughts on this blog, or the plan for my ongoing research, or anything to do with deprivation, inequality and health – you can contact me on emilie.mcswiggan@ed.ac.uk.