Healthcare systems are facing increasing need and demand because of aging populations, increasing chronic disease and multimorbidity, and new therapeutics and diagnostics being brought to market. These factors, when combined, require unsustainable levels of funding.
We must also acknowledge that a large proportion of chronic diseases that plague healthcare systems are preventable or can be brought into remission through lifestyle interventions and that 70% of health outcomes are determined by social factors that remain mostly unaddressed in healthcare systems predicated on the biomedical model.
There have been various attempts to look outside the biomedical box since the birth of social medicine in the 19th century but none of the approaches has been able to challenge the dominance of the biomedical model. More recently, however, the rise of social prescriptions across European countries gives hope that there are non-biomedical means we can use to improve patient and population outcomes while optimising resource utilisation. Social prescriptions provide a way to connect individuals to sources of support within their community to address social determinants of health and encourage self-care for a variety of physical and mental health conditions.