Social Prescribing and the Welfare State

Current public policy does not create the conditions people need to be healthy. In this context, social prescribing, which identifies unmet needs in clinical care and links individuals to community-based resources that help meet those needs, can help mitigate the health consequences of poor public policy. This is important, and social prescribing programs should be expanded. However, social prescribing does not fundamentally reconfigure the power relations and distributive institutions that create the problems in the first place. On the other hand, the welfare state, by publicly providing necessary goods and services that are not well allocated by markets and distributing income to those unable to engage in paid labour, can do this. Thus, the welfare state has a central role in improving population health, and efforts to enhance the welfare state should occur alongside efforts to boost social prescribing.