Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Background: The social determinants of health (SDoH) are known to contribute to health inequity, especially among vulnerable populations. Health system design can foster inequity. Social prescription, a feedback-loop process, involves trusted individuals in clinical and community settings working with patients to address the SDoH through non-medical prescription. Ontario Health Teams (OHTs), established in 2019 to integrate care and address fragmentation, provide a promising platform to implement social prescription. However, it is unclear how OHTs can be designed to make it easy for healthcare professionals to adopt social prescription. With a systems approach, we seek to understand barriers and facilitators to adopt social prescription within the East Toronto Health Partners (ETHP) OHT. Methods: A qualitative descriptive study will be conducted through semi-structured interviews with physicians, healthcare professionals, staff, leaders and decision-makers. We aim to conduct interviews with up to 30 participants or by thematic saturation. A 5-minute questionnaire will collect demographic data. Barriers and facilitators will be identified across three domains-sociotechnical work system, processes, and outcomes-as per the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS 2.0) framework. The study is exploratory and does not propose a specific hypothesis. Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics will be used to analyze the data. Impact: Identifying the system-level barriers and facilitators to adopting social prescription within OHTs will inform OHT design, implementation & evaluation decisions in East Toronto & other regions. This study will provide crucial insights to support ETHP's growth as an OHT, specifically in addressing social risk factors among patients. As the first step toward reimagining Ontario's health systems, we aim to shift toward localized, integrated, & community-based care, to provide holistic & sustainable solutions for patients.