Implementing social interventions in primary care

Primary care–based social interventions offer an important means to mitigate threats to individual and community health posed by adverse social conditions. Effective interventions include those that target individual-level determinants, connections with community resources, community-focused partnerships and structures within health teams that affect equity. Accumulating evidence points to the positive impacts of social interventions on broad markers of health; however, most research in this area has focused on implementation and process measures, rather than outcomes. Some interventions require large, interdisciplinary health care resources to implement, but many are accessible to small group practices or individual providers.