About the map

The global population is ageing. In 2019, for the first time in world history, those over the age of 65 outnumbered those under the age of 5. Accompanying older age are a range of health and social issues, for example dementia, declining physical function, unemployment, and lack of social support, which can interact to create complex problems, such as social isolation, loneliness, or poor quality of life. While general practitioners can address the health and medical needs of older adults, they are less optimally equipped to address the social or non-medical needs. This evidence and gap map (EGM) focuses on social prescribing and social prescription interventions intended to address the non-clinical and/or social needs of older adults.

A total of 235 articles were included in this EGM, of which, 170 were primary studies, and 65 were reviews.

Eligibility criteria of included articles

Older adults, defined by the World Health Organization as 60 years and above;
Any setting and location;
All social prescribing schemes addressing a non-clinical need, connecting older adults with community support services which meet the need, and follow-up to assess uptake or outcomes of the connection, or social prescription, in which the effectiveness of community-based services is measured, but referral is not mentioned;
Study design including one of the following: completed or on-going systematic reviews, studies with a comparison/control group, randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental studies (where a group is controlled to a group who did not receive the intervention), pre-post analysis with/without control group (including qualitative studies).

Viewing the map

This map is a matrix with intervention categories as rows and outcome categories as columns. Each cell has bubble(s) representing articles assessing the corresponding intervention and outcome. The size of the bubble is proportionate to the number of articles, with a bigger bubble indicating more articles.

In the top left-hand corner of the window there is a gear icon followed by the word ‘Filters’. Clicking on this will open a pop-up menu from the left side of the screen in which included articles can be filtered to show only the ones that correspond to a specific code, for example, all studies conducted in a specific country and/or setting.

To view the articles in a particular cell, scroll your mouse over the one of interest. This will show the total number of reviews and primary studies, segregated into critically low-quality reviews, low-quality reviews, moderate quality reviews, high quality reviews, randomized controlled trials and non-randomized studies, corresponding to that specific cell. Clicking on the cell will pull up a pop-up menu from the right-hand side of the screen where all the article titles and meta-data are shown, including a summary of the article based on the published abstract.

This evidence and gap map is helpful because it allows us to visualize the evidence – areas in which there is lots of evidence and areas in which evidence is scarce. However, it is important to note that a lot of evidence in one area does not mean it is high quality or strong evidence.

Quality of reviews is based on the AMSTAR2 quality assessment tool. Primary studies were classified as randomized controlled trials or non-randomized studies. With AMSTAR2, there are four possible ratings: high, moderate, low, or critically low-quality reviews. Critically low-quality reviews are shown in red. Low quality reviews are shown in yellow. Moderate quality reviews are shown in orange and high-quality reviews are shown in green. Randomized controlled trials are shown in purple and non-randomized studies are shown in blue.