Social Prescribing for Children and Young People in Viet Nam: Where Could Community-Connected Support Add Value, and What Adaptations and Safeguards Are Needed?
VIET NAM CONTEXT
Social Prescribing for Children and Young People in Viet Nam: Where Could Community-Connected Support Add Value, and What Adaptations and Safeguards Are Needed?
Category: Viet Nam Context
Social prescribing for children and young people should not be understood as adult social prescribing with a younger age limit. Children live within families, schools and other institutions that influence what they can choose, where they can go, who needs to be involved and how information about them is handled. Their ability to understand options and express preferences also changes substantially with age and development. A pathway that may be relatively straightforward for a 35-year-old adult can therefore look very different when the person at the centre is 8, 14 or 17.
That does not mean community-connected care has little to offer younger people. Some children and young people may benefit from stronger social connection, meaningful activities, peer relationships, opportunities to build confidence and skills, participation in sport, arts, nature or volunteering, or practical help overcoming barriers to community participation. The important question for Viet Nam is not whether an adult model can simply be imported, but how community-connected support could be designed around the rights, development, family context, preferences and safety of children and young people themselves.
The evidence is growing, but it remains an emerging field
Compared with adult social prescribing, the evidence base for children and young people remains small. A 2025 scoping review identified only nine eligible studies, all published between 2020 and 2024. Programs included people approximately 7–25 years of age, but most participants were adolescents or young adults rather than younger children. The review described a field still in its early stages, with limitations including small samples, limited use of comparison groups, inconsistent follow-up and incomplete reporting. It also identified ethical and implementation issues involving connector scope of practice, family involvement, confidentiality and equity.
A separate systematic mapping review published in 2025 similarly showed that pathways for children and young people often look different from conventional adult models. Across 35 academic publications and 33 grey-literature sources, educational settings frequently appeared as referral routes alongside primary care, self-referral and other pathways. A link worker or similar connecting function was common but not universal. Important gaps remained around access, outcomes, costs, harms and which young people may be systematically missed.
Evidence published in 2026 provides a much larger picture of real-world use. An analysis of electronic social-prescribing records from more than 700 UK sites included 52,585 people aged 4–25 years referred between 2017 and 2025. Most were 18 or older, 91% lived in urban areas and 58% came from the three most deprived deciles. Mental-health, psychological or behavioural needs accounted for 44% of recorded referral reasons. Participants had an average of approximately 4.6 social-prescribing contacts, while 34% had a recorded onward referral to community support. Access among those under 18 was relatively limited, and the average age of people referred increased over time.
The administrative data had substantial missingness and variation in recording quality, including uncertainty about whether an absent recorded intervention meant that no intervention occurred or that it was simply not documented. The findings therefore improve our understanding of how youth social prescribing is being used, but they do not establish its effectiveness. Most evidence also continues to come from health systems outside Viet Nam. It should inform questions for Vietnamese implementation rather than provide a model to copy.
New evidence from youth mental-health pathways is promising but still limited
One of the most informative 2026 studies examined social prescribing for young people already referred to specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in England. The Wellbeing While Waiting study enrolled 558 young people aged 11-18 years across 11 CAMHS sites, with 333 allocated to social prescribing and 225 to usual care. Importantly, it was a multi-site non-randomised controlled trial, not a randomized trial.
The social-prescribing pathway involved trained link workers and was offered while young people remained within the CAMHS waiting-list pathway. Participants receiving the intervention had around five link-worker sessions on average. No significant differences were found between groups in anxiety or depressive symptoms. The study did, however, report improvements in overall emotional and behavioural difficulties, including conduct, hyperactivity and peer difficulties, alongside improvements in prosocial behaviour and resilience.
These results need to be interpreted carefully. The effectiveness analysis included 449 participants after excluding 54 young people allocated to social prescribing who did not receive an intervention session and a further 55 with missing baseline sociodemographic data. Because implementation was non-randomised, residual differences between groups may still have affected the findings despite statistical adjustment. The improvement in total behavioural difficulties was around 0.15 standard deviations and the improvement in resilience around 0.24 standard deviations, statistically significant but small effects. Fifteen adverse events were reported during the study, most commonly deterioration in symptoms, but none was judged by the Data Monitoring Committee to be related to the social-prescribing pathway.
A reasonable interpretation is therefore that social prescribing may offer a useful adjunct in this particular CAMHS waiting-list context, with modest signals relating to some aspects of functioning and resilience. The study does not demonstrate that social prescribing treats anxiety or depression, nor does it support replacing appropriate mental-health assessment or treatment with community activities.
“Children and young people” is not one legal category in Viet Nam
Age terminology requires particular care when international research is applied in Viet Nam.
Under Viet Nam's Law on Children No. 102/2016/QH13, as amended and reflected in Consolidated Text No. 108/VBHN-VPQH dated 27 August 2025, a child is a person under 16 years of age. The law requires the best interests of children to be considered and protects children's right to express views on matters affecting them.
By contrast, Viet Nam's Law on Youth, as reflected in Consolidated Text No. 92/VBHN-VPQH dated 22 August 2025, defines youth as Vietnamese citizens from 16 to 30 years of age.
The international term “children and young people” should therefore be understood in this article as a descriptive public-health term rather than a single Vietnamese legal category. An actual program would need to state clearly which age groups it serves and apply the relevant legal requirements to each.
This matters in practice. A pathway for a 7-year-old child, a 15-year-old adolescent and a 22-year-old university student should not automatically use identical approaches to family involvement, decision-making, confidentiality or communication simply because all three may appear within international youth social-prescribing research.
The young person's voice must remain visible
The familiar social-prescribing question, “What matters to you?”, becomes especially important when children are involved.
Parents and caregivers often have essential information about health, behaviour, family circumstances and practical barriers. Younger children may need substantial adult support, while children with communication difficulties may require adapted approaches or, in some situations, proxy information. But a pathway designed around a child should not become a conversation conducted entirely between adults about that child.
Viet Nam's legal framework supports this principle. The Law on Children protects children's participation and requires their opinions and wishes to be considered in ways appropriate to age and development. International social-prescribing research identifies family involvement as one of the central complexities of youth pathways, including situations in which a parent's preferred activity was not what the young person themselves wanted.
A developmentally appropriate pathway therefore needs a realistic way of hearing the child's or young person's own priorities. For an adolescent, this may be an ordinary conversation. For a younger child, it may involve simple choices, visual approaches or play-based communication. For a child with communication or neurodevelopmental differences, further adaptation may be needed.
The question is not whether families should be involved. In many situations, they clearly need to be. The question is how to involve them without allowing the young person's own preferences and experience to disappear.
Younger children often require a family-connected pathway
One major difference from adult social prescribing is that children may not be able to turn an agreed community connection into actual participation on their own. They may need a parent or caregiver to complete registration, provide consent, pay fees, arrange transport, accompany them or reorganize work and family responsibilities. A child may genuinely want to join a football club, arts group or community activity and still be unable to attend because nobody can take them there.
A 2026 qualitative evaluation of a Canadian child-and-youth social-prescribing program illustrates this challenge. The evaluation involved 33 young participants and 30 caregivers and examined a model that used supported referrals, financial assistance and transport support. Connectors could also liaise directly with community organizations. Participants and caregivers valued the individualized approach, yet engagement could still be limited when families faced illness, work demands, transport difficulties or other pressures.
The lesson for Viet Nam is not that parents are barriers. It is that family capacity forms part of the implementation context. Assessing whether an activity exists is not enough; a pathway also needs to understand whether participation is realistically possible.
Schools could be important partners, but Viet Nam already has a school support framework
International evidence suggests that schools are particularly relevant to youth social prescribing. They are places where children spend much of their daily lives, where changes in participation, relationships or functioning may become visible, and where sport, arts, clubs and peer activities may already exist.
However, a Vietnamese model should not turn every educational, behavioural or social difficulty into a “social prescription.” Nor should established school-support functions simply be renamed as social prescribing.
Viet Nam already has a current regulatory framework for school counselling and school social work. Circular No. 18/2025/TT-BGDĐT, effective from 31 October 2025, applies to a broad range of educational institutions and requires school counselling and social work to protect learners' lawful rights and interests, safety and information confidentiality, as well as their rights to participate voluntarily and make their own decisions. It also emphasizes a learner-centred approach and coordination between schools, families and society.
A future social-prescribing pathway should therefore work with, rather than duplicate, these arrangements. A school might help identify a need, participate in coordination or support a community connection, while counselling, professional social work, healthcare and child-protection responsibilities remain within the systems accountable for them.
The most useful model is likely to be connected rather than school-owned.
Social prescribing should not become a waiting room for mental-health care
Mental health features prominently in international youth social-prescribing pathways. In the large 2026 UK dataset, mental-health, psychological or behavioural needs were the most common recorded reason for referral. Earlier youth social-prescribing evidence also frequently involves mental-health and well-being needs.
This creates both an opportunity and a risk. A young person experiencing social withdrawal, reduced confidence, loneliness or difficulty returning to meaningful everyday activities may benefit from help connecting with an appropriate community opportunity. Social participation may also complement clinical care for someone already receiving mental-health treatment.
But social prescribing should not become a way to compensate for unavailable specialist services by redefining clinical need as a community problem. International research has already identified inappropriate referrals and complex mental-health needs as implementation challenges, including attempts to use social prescribing to fill gaps in specialist provision.
The Wellbeing While Waiting study is useful precisely because the social-prescribing intervention remained within an existing CAMHS pathway. Young people had already been clinically referred and continued waiting for specialist support; community-connected care did not replace clinical assessment or treatment.
For Viet Nam, this boundary needs to be explicit. Severe psychological distress, suicidality or self-harm risk, significant psychiatric symptoms, abuse, violence or other serious safety concerns require appropriate clinical or safeguarding responses. Community participation may sit alongside those responses, but it should not substitute for them simply because formal services are difficult to access.
Children with disability need more than an accessible referral process
Children and young people with disabilities may have strong reasons to benefit from community connection while also facing some of the greatest practical barriers.
A systematic review of hospital-initiated social prescribing for children and young people with neurodisability found a small and heterogeneous evidence base. It highlighted issues including physical and psychological safety, accessibility of community resources, communication needs and reliance in some situations on parental or proxy information.
The Canadian evaluation provides a practical illustration: even where transport assistance was available, staff described situations in which a child using a wheelchair and living with substantial medical complexity still could not realistically access the proposed activity. The problem was not simply motivation or referral quality; the overall journey remained impractical.
Accessibility therefore means more than a provider stating that children with disabilities are welcome. It includes the venue, transport, communication, supervision, activity design and whether participation is realistically safe and meaningful for that particular child.
Supported connection may matter more than simply giving information
For some young people, information about an activity may be enough. For others, meaningful connection requires more support.
In the Canadian program, connectors could contact community organizations, assist with registration, arrange tickets and help address transport or financial barriers. Families particularly valued this practical navigation.
That does not mean every Vietnamese pathway should provide intensive support. The level of navigation should remain proportionate to need. But the distinction between signposting and supported connection becomes particularly important when a child depends on adults, transport, paperwork or payment before participation is possible.
Sending information to a family should therefore not automatically count as a successful connection. A more meaningful question is whether an appropriate opportunity became realistically accessible and, where the young person wanted it, whether participation actually occurred.
Safeguarding must be built into the pathway
Children may be connected to sports clubs, arts programs, youth organizations, volunteering, nature activities and other settings outside healthcare. These environments do not need to operate like hospitals, but child safety cannot be treated as an afterthought.
Viet Nam already has a regulatory framework directly relevant to many such activities. Circular No. 27/2022/TT-BLĐTBXH, effective from 1 March 2023 and currently in force, guides children's participation in activities outside the family and outside educational institutions. It applies both to children and to agencies, organizations and enterprises organizing those activities.
Among other requirements, activities must be appropriate to children's capacity and age and provide safe, healthy and child-friendly conditions. For children aged 7 years or older, the organizing body must obtain the views of both the child and the parent or caregiver in accordance with the Circular; for children under 7, the parent or caregiver acts on the child's behalf. Children also have the right to withdraw when an activity does not meet or fit their needs and wishes.
These provisions fit naturally with person-centred social prescribing. A referral from healthcare does not displace them and does not transfer clinical or child-protection responsibility wholesale to a community provider.
A responsible pathway should therefore know who will receive the child, what the activity involves, what supervision is expected, how concerns can be raised and how escalation works when an issue falls outside the community organization's role.
The wider child-protection policy environment is also evolving. Decision No. 1415/QĐ-TTg dated 28 July 2026 establishes the National Programme on Child Protection and Prevention and Reduction of Unlawful Child Labour for 2026–2030. Among its targets for 2030 are integrated child-protection service models in 100% of provinces and centrally governed cities and intersectoral child-protection service models in 95% of commune-level areas.
These are policy targets, not evidence that equivalent capacity already exists throughout Viet Nam. Their relevance to social prescribing is that any future pathway should connect with existing and developing child-protection mechanisms rather than create a parallel informal system.
Family involvement and confidentiality require a deliberate balance
Youth social prescribing creates a tension that is less prominent in many adult pathways: the young person may depend on family involvement while also needing privacy.
An adolescent may disclose loneliness, peer conflict, distress or difficulties at home only if they understand what information will remain private and what may need to be shared. Parents, on the other hand, may legitimately need certain information to enable participation or protect the child. The answer cannot be a blanket rule that everything is confidential or that everything is automatically shared with parents.
Viet Nam's Law No. 91/2025/QH15 on Personal Data Protection, effective from 1 January 2026, contains specific provisions for children's personal data. Under Article 24, the legal representative generally exercises the data-subject rights of a child, subject to statutory exceptions. Where processing is intended to disclose information about the private life or personal secrets of a child aged 7 years or older, consent is required from both the child and the legal representative.
That specific dual-consent provision should not be generalized into a claim that every form of children's data processing always requires identical consent arrangements. The applicable legal requirements depend on the particular processing activity. Decree No. 356/2025/ND-CP also includes health status and information about private life, personal secrets and family secrets among categories of sensitive personal data.
For social prescribing, the practical principle is straightforward: a sports club, arts organization or other community provider rarely needs a child's entire clinical or psychosocial history simply because healthcare helped make the connection.
Information sharing should therefore remain purpose-driven, proportionate and legally appropriate.
A child-focused navigator needs a different competency profile
Social prescribing with children requires more than knowing which community resources are available. A navigator needs to communicate in ways appropriate to age and development, work constructively with families without allowing the adult perspective to eclipse the young person's voice, understand privacy boundaries, recognize safeguarding concerns and know when needs exceed the social-prescribing role.
Viet Nam also has a professional framework that should not be bypassed by creating a new job title. Decree No. 110/2024/ND-CP on Social Work regulates social-work practice, and from 1 January 2027 the applicable social-work practice-registration requirements take effect. Circular No. 29/2026/TT-BYT, effective from 25 August 2026, further regulates social-work practice and the updating of professional knowledge.
Where a navigator performs activities that constitute professional social-work practice, calling that person a “link worker,” “community connector” or “navigator” does not remove the applicable professional requirements. Clinical assessment and treatment likewise remain clinical functions.
Social-prescribing navigation should connect systems rather than quietly absorb responsibilities that belong to regulated professions.
Equity should be designed into access, not examined only afterwards
Children from households facing financial hardship may simultaneously have substantial potential to benefit from community opportunities and limited ability to access them.
The Canadian evaluation demonstrated that assistance with activity costs, registration and transport could make participation possible, but family circumstances could still prevent some connections. The 2026 CAMHS study also found that young people allocated to social prescribing who did not actually receive the intervention differed from those who engaged, including greater socioeconomic disadvantage among some non-recipients.
These issues are relevant to Viet Nam. A well-resourced urban setting may have numerous community activities nearby, while another locality may have very few. Some families can afford transport, sport or music; others cannot. Digital navigation may make access easier for one group while creating another barrier for another.
An equity-sensitive pathway should therefore ask not only who is referred, but who can begin participation, who can continue, who benefits and who disappears between those steps.
The resource must be suitable for the child, not merely available
An unsuitable community connection can create cost, inconvenience and disappointment for both a child and their family. The first available program is not necessarily the right one.
The Canadian evaluation documented situations in which an initial social prescription did not fit the young person's interests. Rather than treating this as non-compliance, staff used it as an opportunity to understand the person better and explore something more appropriate.
A child-focused asset directory should therefore contain more than a provider's name and contact details. Programs need to understand age range, capacity, costs, accessibility, timing, supervision and relevant communication or support requirements.
Availability is not the same as suitability.
What could an early pathway look like in Viet Nam?
Viet Nam should probably not begin with a broad “social prescribing for all children and young people” program. The evidence remains immature, the developmental range is too wide and legal and operational requirements differ substantially across ages and settings.
A more responsible pilot would start with one clearly defined population, one referral context and a limited group of community partners. Examples might include adolescents attending a defined outpatient service, young people with selected long-term conditions, or a carefully governed collaboration between healthcare, education and community organizations. The choice should respond to a real local implementation problem and credible community capacity rather than enthusiasm for the terminology.
The first step should clarify why community support is being considered and whose priorities are being addressed. The pathway should explore what matters to the young person in a developmentally appropriate way, understand relevant family and practical circumstances, and determine whether the issue is suitable for community-connected support or requires clinical, professional social-work or child-protection intervention instead or alongside it.
Where community connection is appropriate, the young person and family should understand what is being offered, what participation involves and what information needs to be shared. The receiving organization should have agreed to participate in the pathway and have realistic capacity. Follow-up should establish whether the connection was appropriate and usable rather than assuming that referral equals success.
Evaluation should measure more than attendance
The evidence base remains too early to justify broad outcome claims. An initial Vietnamese pilot could examine acceptability, whether young people feel heard, whether community connections match their interests, whether those connections are completed and sustained, and why people decline or discontinue participation. Evaluation should also examine transport and cost barriers, differences in access between groups, community capacity, navigator workload, safeguarding concerns and privacy issues.
Depending on the purpose of the program, outcomes such as social connection, belonging, confidence, participation, resilience or well-being may be appropriate. Clinical outcomes may also be measured when a program operates within healthcare, but their inclusion does not turn social prescribing into clinical treatment.
The 2026 CAMHS study illustrates why outcome specificity matters: it identified small improvements in selected behavioural and resilience-related outcomes but no significant improvement in anxiety or depressive symptoms compared with usual care.
A program should therefore define in advance what it is realistically expected to change, rather than measure many outcomes and highlight whichever result happens to be positive.
The child should not become a referral object
When many adults are involved, it is surprisingly easy for the person at the centre to become the least active participant. A clinician identifies a need, a parent agrees, a school contributes information, a navigator finds an activity and a community organization receives the referral. Every adult may be acting with good intentions, yet the child may never genuinely have chosen what happens.
That would sit uneasily with both social prescribing's person-centred philosophy and Viet Nam's child-rights framework.
A child-focused pathway should therefore keep returning to a simple question:
Does this child or young person understand what is being offered, have a meaningful opportunity to express what matters to them, and experience the connection as something being done with them rather than to them?
The answer will differ for a young child, an adolescent and a young adult. That is precisely why adaptation is not an optional refinement of youth social prescribing. It is part of the model itself.
Community connection should complement the systems children already need
International evidence suggests potential value in supported connection to meaningful community opportunities for some children and young people, particularly around participation, social connection, resilience and everyday functioning. At the same time, effectiveness evidence remains early and heterogeneous, most research comes from countries other than Viet Nam, and younger children remain relatively underrepresented.
Studies published in 2026 add important real-world and controlled evidence, but they do not resolve the substantial uncertainties around effectiveness, equity, safety or transferability across health systems.
Viet Nam therefore does not need to decide whether to “adopt” a foreign social-prescribing model. A more useful question is what kind of community-connected pathway could add value within Vietnamese healthcare, family, education and community systems while respecting the rights, development and safety of children and young people.
That pathway should not replace parents, schools, professional social work, child-protection services, pediatric care or mental-health treatment. Nor should it assume that every child with a social or non-clinical need requires a referral.
Its potential value lies elsewhere: helping a child or young person move from an identified need, interest or aspiration to a community opportunity that is meaningful, accessible, safe and realistically usable, while keeping their own voice visible throughout the process.
For Viet Nam, that is a responsible place to begin.
References
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