“Social prescribing is the best thing since sliced bread,” said a patient partner during the Q&A following my colleague Thomas Iverson’s presentation on our 2024 rapid review on peers and volunteers in social prescribing at INCREASE BC 2025.

The case for social prescribing

Having seen firsthand how older adults in the community benefit from social prescribing as a former seniors’ community connector in Langley, BC, I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment expressed by the enthusiastic patient partner. It’s hard to ignore the evidence in favour: a SROI analysis by KPMG, commissioned by the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing, estimated that every $1 invested into social prescribing programs may return $4.43 to society through improved wellbeing and reduced costs to our publicly funded health and social services.

We also live in an era where you can only bring one issue per doctor’s appointment because of our “family doctor shortage.” Many people arrive in primary care with problems that are not only medical, but also social, emotional, and practical. Social prescribing, a mechanism for connecting people to community-based social supports that alleviates pressure from the health system, seems like a common-sense, upstream solution to the crises in our overburdened health system… right?

Not the solution to everything

The real question is not whether social prescribing has value. In many contexts, it clearly does. The better question is whether social prescribing is increasingly being asked to carry more than it can reasonably hold.

A paper by Mirjam Pot argues that social prescribing is often framed as a “hyper-solution”: a policy idea expected to improve health, relieve pressure on the healthcare system, foster social inclusion, and even strengthen society more broadly. Pot’s critique is that this framing fits neatly within a logic of austerity. Social prescribing becomes attractive to policymakers not because it is compassionate and person-centred, but because it appears to offer a low-cost, politically palatable response to problems that are actually structural:

“Therefore, claims that social prescribing is able to address the social dimension of health and disease at the level of service provision, can, paradoxically, contribute to the further individualization of health because social prescribing undermines the idea that health is impacted by more abstract forms of ‘the social.’”
– Mirjam Pot, 2024

This critique especially resonates with me as someone who has championed social prescribing for years. It would be naive to assume that the structural factors that shape our health – our capitalist political economy, public policy choices, systemic racism, and colonialism among them – that impact health can be addressed through even the most well-designed referral pathway if governments continue to underfund the very community organizations that those prescriptions depend on.

The community sector is not a shortcut

Academics and policymakers often assume that link workers, community connectors, and navigators have more time than physicians to sit with complexity, build trust, ask “what matters to you,” help people find the right supports. Sometimes that is true. But that assumption can also obscure a harder reality: if the community sector is already stretched thin or that there are client needs that community connectors are unable to fill (e.g., financial constraints where they are above the income threshold for subsidies but still unable to afford the services needed, happens more often then you think), then social prescribing can become less about expanding care than redistributing strain from health to social services.

Pot’s argument is helpful here too. She suggests that social prescribing can expand who is expected to be responsible for health while also expanding what the health system is expected to accomplish. Responsibility quietly shifts outward to nonprofits, volunteers, local groups, and community workers without necessarily shifting sustainable resources along with it.

This is no small concern. If social prescribing is rolled out in a way that assumes community capacity rather than investing in it, then upstream can quickly become a euphemism for offloading.

From prescription to co-creation

When I spoke with Le-Tien Bhaskar on the first episode of the Social Rx podcast, we talked about the power of students in this movement – not only to champion social prescribing – but to effect systems change and shape what kind of social prescribing we are building.

That is why I keep coming back to Dr. Kate Mulligan and Dr. Gary Bloch’s recent conceptual paper, Social prescribing beyond social prescriptions: moving social prescribing from commodification to co-creation. Their argument is that the field risks narrowing itself when it becomes too focused on the prescription as the central unit of analysis and action. Instead, Mulligan & Bloch push for a broader vision of social prescribing rooted in co-creation, relationships, community engagement, and self-determination.

That shift matters. At its best, social prescribing should not be about turning community into a menu of services that can be neatly prescribed, tracked, and optimized. It should be about building the conditions for belonging, participation, and care in ways that communities themselves help shape.

Social prescribing is not overhyped, but at risk of being oversold

I do not believe social prescribing is “just” another overhyped health policy trend. But if we want to scale and spread social prescribing, we have to be honest about what it can offer instead of asking it to solve everything.

Social prescribing is not a substitute for a well-funded welfare state. It is not a substitute for primary care reform. It is not a substitute for social policy. It is not a substitute for rebuilding the community sector after years of strain. And it certainly is not a politically neutral intervention. The fact that it sits at the intersection of health and social care systems means that it will always raise questions about who is responsible for what, who gets funded, and whose needs are legible to the system and urgent enough to deserve structural change.

Social prescribing will mature not by promising more, but by becoming more honest about what it can offer, more attentive to power and resources, and more willing to invest in the community conditions that make connection possible in the first place.

That kind of social prescribing is still worth arguing for – and probably worth arguing about too.

Jeffrey Wong (he/him) is an incoming MSc student in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, a research assistant at the Innovation in Dementia and Aging Lab at the University of British Columbia, and co-lead of the Canadian Social Prescribing Student Collective (CSPSC). He is a recent graduate from Trinity Western University and co-founder of the CSPSC Trinity Western University Chapter. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of CSPSC.