An applied body, not a research one

The Institute for Social Connection exists to close a specific gap. There is now a large and reasonably consistent evidence base showing that social connection affects health, and very little practical guidance on how to build programmes that produce it. We work on the second problem.

Who this is for

Programme managers, clinicians and social prescribing link workers, community organisers, employers, and the people who fund all of them. If you have to decide what to run, how to staff it, and how to show it worked, this site is written for you.

What we publish

Practice notes answer one question each — how to handle attrition after week three, what a referral pathway needs to contain, which outcome measures a commissioner will accept.Frameworks are longer and lay out a whole approach, written to be worked through rather than read once.

What we do not do

We do not deliver services, run programmes, or advise individuals. We conduct no primary research and run no trials. Everything here is synthesis of work other people published, and it is cited as such.

Nothing here is clinical advice. Where guidance touches on health systems it describes how services have been designed elsewhere; it does not tell any clinician what to do with any patient.

How we source

Every piece is written against a fixed citation library rather than from memory. It holds 87 entries, 17 of which have been checked directly against the published document, and each records the publisher, the publication date, the URL, and the specific findings we rely on.

Guidance may only cite sources published on or before its own publication date, and this is enforced mechanically rather than left to editorial care. We treat a report's publication date as its date — a 2024 surveillance report describing 2022 data is a 2024 source.

Where the evidence is weak, we say so. A good deal of the intervention literature on loneliness consists of small studies with inconsistent measures, and guidance that pretends otherwise is worse than useless to someone spending a budget on it.

Bylines and corrections

Work is published under the Institute's name rather than individual bylines, because it is organisational synthesis rather than personal authorship. If something here is wrong, write tocontact@instituteforsocialconnection.org and we will correct it.