Investing resources to address social factors affecting health: The essential role of social prescribing

The evidence around addressing social factors related to health is robust and we have known about the importance of tackling these issues for many decades. Despite this, most health and care systems invest most of their resources on biomedically oriented interventions at the expense of interventions that can address social factors related to health. In this manuscript, we give an overview of approaches that could be used to increase allocation of resources to social prescribing, a class of health and care interventions that can address several social factors affecting health.