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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Kate Gibson, Professor Suzanne Moffatt
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2021 The AuthorsSocial prescribing, characterised by a link worker connecting patients with local groups and services, is currently being widely implemented in the UK. Taking clients' experiences of a social prescribing intervention in the North of England between November 2019 and July 2020 as its focus, this paper employs ethnographic methods to explore the complex social contexts in which social prescribing is delivered. Building on Bourdieusian approaches to class, we concentrate on four case studies to offer a theoretically-grounded analysis which attends to the relationship between everyday contexts and the classed processes by which health capital may be accrued. By following clients' experiences and trajectories through shifting positions across time - often entailing moments of tension and disjuncture - we explore how processes of classed inequality relate to engagement in the social prescribing intervention. Our results show how structural contexts, and relatedly the possession of capital, shape clients' priorities to invest in the cultural health capital offered by the intervention. Importantly, while inequalities shaped participants’ capacity to engage with the intervention, all participants recognised the value of the health capital on offer. We conclude by arguing that inequalities cannot be tackled through focusing on the individual in the delivery of personalised care and therefore offer a counter narrative to socio-political assumptions that social prescribing reduces health inequalities. Crucially, we argue that such assumptions wrongly presuppose that people are homogenously disposed to engaging in their future health.
Author(s): Gibson K, Pollard TM, Moffatt S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Social Science and Medicine
Year: 2021
Volume: 280
Print publication date: 01/07/2021
Online publication date: 16/05/2021
Acceptance date: 11/05/2021
Date deposited: 13/12/2021
ISSN (print): 0277-9536
ISSN (electronic): 1873-5347
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114037
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114037
PubMed id: 34033978
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