Social Prescribing Evidence for Refugee Populations: A Rapid Realist Review

39 studies from a review of 7,436 records synthesize evidence on social prescribing and social-capital interventions for refugee populations. Victoria Touzel authored this PDF document, which was last updated on May 8, 2026. The review identifies five intervention families and 15 prioritized program theories, with evidence strongest for in-appointment and onward referral strategies.

Use Cases

• Evaluating the effectiveness of barrier-reduction interventions based on the identified intervention families.
• Informing program design for trauma-responsive support services based on the Context-Mechanism-Outcome configurations.
• Developing co-produced navigation strategies for refugee support based on the concept of bidirectional exchange.
• Prioritizing workforce investment in social prescribing based on the identified critical evidence gaps.
• Analyzing the role of safety as a spatial and relational concept in social prescribing outcomes.

Strengths

• Synthesizes evidence from 39 studies identified from 7,436 initial records.
• Develops 15 prioritized program theories organized into five distinct intervention families.
• Licensed under CC-BY-4.0, allowing for broad reuse and adaptation.

Limitations

• The dataset is a 3.9 MB PDF document; data extraction is required for computational analysis.
• Row count and column-level documentation are absent; field semantics must be inferred from the text.
• The description notes evidence limitations restrict wider generalizability, particularly for marginalized subgroups.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

RAMESES-compliant rapid realist review of six databases (2014–2024), supplemented by grey literature and citation chasing.

Time Range

Literature review covers 2014 to 2024.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-08 05:48:33

Geography

International evidence; specific geography is not stated.