Social determinants of health - an audit

This audit has come about as part of the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) workstream, part of the national programme to 'raise the bar for MS'.

SDoH questionnaire

There have been delays in launching the survey due to the coronavirus pandemic, but now, workstream lead Professor Gavin Giovannoni introduces the audit and asks for your help:

'The SDoH are life-enhancing resources, such as food supply, housing, economic, social relationships, transportation, education and health care, whose distribution across populations effectively determines length and quality of life.

The SDoH are critical if we want to ‘raise the bar’ for everyone. It may prove relatively easy to improve services for well-educated engaged people, but it is important not to ignore the needs of the more vulnerable people with MS, i.e. the less educated, less eloquent, less well off, less demanding patients and potentially those from disadvantaged groups.

We want to provide MS services for all.

We would like to invite you to participate in an audit exploring the SDoH among our patients with MS. 100% of workstream attendees agreed in principle to participate in our pilot audit and we would be pleased if you join us too. The aim of the audit is to address the other often-ignored factors in society that drive inequality in health outcomes and to promote a ‘no patient left behind’ philosophy.

This first audit is simple. For each participating site we propose to report:

• whether they have a comprehensive register of their patients,
• an estimate of prevalence for their population;
• whether they have access to some surrogates for the socioeconomic status (SES) of their patients;
• whether they are screening their patients for some key SDoH;
• whether their patients have access to social prescribing.

Participation is very easy and will take only a few minutes of your time. Please follow the link, and complete our SDoH Google questionnaire.

Thank-you.'