Optimizing intervention strategies via social prescribing as a means of encouraging and enabling healthy and sustainable dietary behaviours in individuals from low-income families

Members of low-income families, living in the most deprived areas in Scotland are particularly at risk of suboptimal nutrition and obesity. While many different interventions and initiatives have been introduced into communities over the last 20 years to try and tackle obesity in lower income households (often through Health & Social Care Partnerships), there is little evidence that such strategies have been successful and that they are rarely robustly evaluated. Uptake from individuals living in deprived communities is often low, and intervention design is often based on available community skills and resources rather than scientific evidence about what is required to change behaviour. The present project will address these issues by working with local authority, third sector and NHS partners to evaluate and enhance current community-based interventions for low-income families.

We will focus on ‘social prescribing’, a recent initiative implemented in Scotland, which enables health professionals to refer clients to a range of local, non-clinical services based on individual needs (e.g. community food access, exercise, housing and benefit advice) to address health needs in a more holistic way. Social prescribing is mainly focused on improving mental health and physical wellbeing. However, local stakeholder consultation indicates it is also an ideal platform through which to offer healthy eating interventions. This project will review existing community interventions designed to improve health and support healthy eating, identifying effective elements that people from low-income households’ value and engage with. These elements will then be combined with strategies that have a proven track record of helping people to change behaviour and used to create a new holistic healthy eating intervention for delivery to clients from low-income families through the existing social prescribing service.