Glossary of Terms – A Scoping Review

Introduction:

Social prescribing uses a person-centred approach to empower individuals through engagement with different community-based initiatives and activities (Kimberlee, 2015; Newstead et al., 2023b; SCIE, 2020). Within Wales, social prescribing has previously been defined as ‘connecting citizens to community support to better manage their health and wellbeing (Rees et al., 2019). The social prescribing pathway provides a means to facilitate the integration of healthcare, social care and community support, allowing individuals to take an active role in improving their health and wellbeing (Kurpas et al., 2023; Rothe & Hiess, 2022).

Over the last decade, social prescribing has seen a period of growth and development (Bertotti et al., 2018; Morse et al., 2022; Rempel et al., 2017) which has been accompanied by a proliferation of a diverse and confusing language (Newstead et al., 2023a; Rempel et al., 2017; Wallace et al., 2021) which impairs effective communication and creates barriers to engagement. In 2018 the Wales Social Prescribing Research Network (Wallace et al., 2018) identified the need for a reference tool to provide a unification of the language associated with social prescribing (Wallace et al., 2018, 2021). To address this need, the Wales School for Social Prescribing Research (WSSPR) committed to the development of a glossary of terms for social prescribing (Wallace et al., 2018), for use in Wales and beyond, to help clarify and standardise the language associated with social prescribing, to improve communication across sectors and with the general public.

The task of producing the glossary of terms included a scoping review of the social prescribing literature (Newstead et al., 2023a, b), consultation with the Welsh social prescribing workforce and other stakeholders (Newstead et al., 2023b) and a group concept mapping study (Newstead et al., 2023a,c). As part of that body of work, it was felt that it would be pertinent to conduct a scoping review of existing glossaries of terms to gain a sense of how glossaries have been developed in different disciplines over the years. This would provide a means to contextualise the work that was undertaken to develop the glossary of terms for social prescribing.