Global Trends in Social Prescribing: Web-Based Crawling Approach

BACKGROUND Social loneliness is a prevalent issue in industrialized countries that can lead to adverse health outcomes, including a 26% increased risk of premature mortality, coronary heart disease, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease. The UK government has implemented a strategy called A Connected Society, which includes social prescribing, a healthcare model where primary care physicians prescribe non-pharmacological interventions in partnership with local communities to address social loneliness. Despite efforts to evaluate their effectiveness, healthcare professionals and policymakers have stressed the lack of strong evidence, indicating a need for evidence-based plans to disseminate social prescribing worldwide. OBJECTIVE This study aims to identify global trends in social prescribing from 2018. To this end, we intend to collect and analyze words related to social prescribing worldwide and evaluate various trends of related words by classifying the core areas of social prescribing. Based on these findings, we propose to provide evidence for implementing social prescribing. METHODS Google's searchable data were collected to analyze online data related to social prescribing. With the help of web crawling, 3,796 news items were collected for the five-year period from 2018 to 2022. Key topics were selected to identify keywords for each major topic related to social prescribing. The topics were grouped into four categories, namely of Health, Program, Governance, and Target, and keywords for each topic were selected thereafter. Text mining was used to determine the importance of words collected from new data. RESULTS Word clouds were generated for words related to social prescribing collected 3,796 words from google news databases, including 128 in 2018, 432 in 2019, 566 in 2020, 748 in 2021, and 1922 in 2022, increasing nearly 15-fold between 2018 and 2022 (5years). Words such as Health, Prescribing, and GPs were highest in terms of frequency in the list for all the years. Between 2020 and 2021, COVID, gardening, and UK were found to be highly-related words. In 2022, NHS and UK ranked high. This dissertation examines social prescribing-related term frequency and classification (2018-2022) in Healthy, Program, Governance, and Target categories. Key findings include increased "Healthy" terms from 2020, "gardening" prominence in "Program," "community" growth across categories, and "Target" term spikes in 2021. CONCLUSIONS This study's discussion highlights four key aspects: 1) "Healthy" category trends emphasize mental health, cancer, and sleep; 2) "Program" category prioritizes gardening, community, home-schooling, and digital initiatives; 3) "Governance" underscores the significance of community resources in social prescribing implementation; and 4) "Target" focuses on four main groups: individuals with long-term conditions, low-level mental health issues, social isolation, or complex social needs impacting wellbeing. Social prescribing is gaining global acceptance and is becoming a global national policy, as the world is witnessing a sharp rise in the aging population, non-contagious diseases, and mental health problems. A successful and sustainable model of social prescribing can be achieved by introducing social prescribing schemes based on the understanding of roles and the impact of multi-sectoral partnerships.