Grant: Operating Grant: College and Community Innovation Social Innovation Fund

<html> <head> </head> <body> This project will pilot and evaluate a nurse-led social prescribing hub delivered through a formal partnership between Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH), the Barrie Family Medicine Teaching Unit (FMTU), and Georgian College. The partners will embed the model within primary care through structured referral pathways, shared governance, and coordinated implementation. The hub targets adults aged 18+ presenting with &#8805;1 metabolic syndrome risk factor and prioritizes individuals facing structural barriers such as food insecurity, limited access to recreation, unstable employment, and social exclusion. Using a mixed-methods applied research design, participating primary care providers will refer eligible patients through a structured electronic workflow to the centralized hub. Registered nursing faculty and supervised Year 3 nursing students will serve as link-workers, conducting structured intake assessments and co developing individualized social prescriptions focused on nutrition, physical activity, and connection to community-based non-clinical services. Link-workers will coordinate referrals, facilitate appointment access, mitigate logistical barriers (e.g., transportation or cost), and conduct structured follow-up to confirm verified service linkage. Evaluation will assess operational feasibility (referral volume, time to first contact), navigation performance (confirmed linkage), primary care integration (provider uptake and workflow alignment), patient-reported wellbeing, and equitable reach across socioeconomic groups. Findings will guide operational refinement and governance planning to support transition from pilot to a permanent, sustainable social prescribing hub embedded within primary care. The project will engage more than 160 students across nursing, fitness, nutrition, and applied research programs, strengthening workforce capacity in prevention-focused, community-integrated care. By formalizing referral pathways and embedding structured navigation within primary care, the model addresses upstream determinants of obesity while generating Canadian implementation evidence to support scalable, equity informed social prescribing. </body> </html>