Identifying and classifying social prescribing terminology in Wales - A group concept mapping study

Within Wales, social prescribing is defined as ‘connecting citizens to community support to better manage their health and wellbeing’ (Rees et al., 2019). Wales has developed a cross-sectional model of social prescribing that is integrated with existing community and statutory services (Wallace et al., 2021; PHW, 2018) that aligns with the Social Services and Wellbeing (Wales) Act (WG, 2014) and the Wellbeing and Future Generations (Wales) Act (WG, 2015) This model moves away from the medicalised model of care, instead focussing on holistic and person-centred methods to improve wellbeing (Pringle & Jesurasa, 2022).

Social prescribing has seen a period of growth and development (Wallace et al, 2021; Bertotti et al., 2018; Morse et al., 2022; Rempel et al., 2017) which has produced 32diverse terminology (Wallace et al., 2021; Rempel et al., 2017; Newstead et al., 2023) that causes confusion, impairs effective communication and creates barriers to engagement. Through consultation, the Wales Social Prescribing Research Network (WSPRN) identified the need for a reference tool to help address these issues (Wallace et al., 2018, 2021). To address this need, the Wales School for Social Prescribing Research (WSSPR) and Public Health Wales (PHW) committed to the development of a glossary of terms for social prescribing in Wales (Wallace et al., 2018).

The first step of this process was a scoping review (Newstead et al., 2023) to capture the social prescribing terminology used within the UK peer-reviewed journal articles and Welsh grey literature. The scoping review identified 373 terms associated with social prescribing, many of which described or were related to the same few aspects of social prescribing. Here we report on the second stage of the glossary development, a group concept mapping to help identify and categorise social prescribing terminology in Wales.