Putting Social, Arts, and Nature-Based Prescribing into Practice for Health and Wellbeing

Social prescribing and its variants, including arts- and nature-based approaches, represent a promising approach in public health that emphasizes person-centered, integrated care and health promotion by connecting people with non-clinical community resources across diverse settings (e.g., community organizations, cultural institutions, and natural environments) to address their health-related social, emotional, and practical needs. Central to these approaches is the co-creation of programs with communities, practitioners, and other stakeholders to ensure relevance, accessibility, and sustained engagement. These initiatives have grown in prominence around the world as evidence accumulates regarding their potential to promote healthier lifestyles, enhance social participation, and generally improve wellbeing and quality of life. As such, prescribing initiatives are increasingly recognized not only for their direct impact on individual health, but also for their role in fostering community connectedness and resilience. However, as the field expands, there remain significant knowledge gaps related to how these initiatives are actually designed, implemented, and sustained within the context of diverse health systems, policies, governance structures, and sociocultural landscapes globally. (Please see the recent collection on “Social Prescribing: Advancing Evidence-Based Public Health Policies,” also in Frontiers in Public Health.)As interest in social, arts, and nature-based prescribing continues to grow, collaborative programs are being rolled out through partnerships between public and private institutions, community organizations, municipalities, and sectors spanning health, social, education, cultural, and environmental domains. Understanding how these programs are implemented, adapted, and evaluated in differing settings is crucial to optimizing prescribing pathways and ensuring successful outcomes. This Research Topic seeks to generate practical, context-specific insights by bringing together interdisciplinary research focused on real-world implementation, program adaptation, stakeholder collaboration, and outcome evaluation. Studies that generate practice-based evidence, document on-the-ground experiences, or develop frameworks for capturing the impacts of these interventions at both individual and system levels are encouraged, and we particularly welcome papers that address how social prescribing initiatives function as community-based health promotion initiatives: fostering health literacy, strengthening social participation, and building the capacity of individuals and communities to engage actively with their own health and wellbeing. We seek to explore the range and limitations of how social, arts, and nature-based prescribing is being embedded within diverse policy, practice, and cultural contexts while recognizing the specificities shaped by local policy landscapes, resources, and governance models. To gather further insights into these processes, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes: 1. Health communication, health literacy, and community engagement strategies supporting prescribing uptake and sustainability 2. Policy analysis, recommendations, and pathways for broader adoption 3. Implementation processes and models for prescribing initiatives 4. Co-creation, stakeholder collaboration, and intersectoral partnerships 5. Adaptation of programs to different populations, settings, and sociocultural contexts 6. Evaluation of health, wellbeing, social participation, and system-level impacts 7. Development and application of evaluation frameworks and tools 8. Practice-based evidence and documentation of real-world experiences 9. Barriers and facilitators influencing sustainability and scale-up Topic editors: Ana Gama, Sonia Dias, Kheng Hock Lee, Chien Earn Lee Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81202/putting-social-arts-and-nature-based-prescribing-into-practice-for-health-and-wellbeing