Hamaad Khan is a UK graduate medical student, and his experience of medicine has developed alongside a parallel engagement with social prescribing and its international development. Alongside his studies, he works with the National Academy for Social Prescribing, supporting the International Social Prescribing Collaborative and engaging with practitioners, policymakers and system leaders across different countries. He has also been exploring how social prescribing systems are constructed and sustained across very different contexts.

I first met Hamaad through the world of social prescribing and was immediately struck by his passion for both health care and health creation, his determination to share his ideas widely not just with medical students but the wider field of health and care and also his eloquence in the delivery of his philosophies. What has stayed with me is the breadth of his thinking beyond the field itself. He is someone who seems instinctively interested in the questions underneath the questions: what we mean by care, how health systems decide what counts as legitimate knowledge, and what happens to relationships when healthcare becomes increasingly organised around measurement, productivity and technological possibility.

What I find particularly interesting is the way Hamaad holds these worlds together. He is neither romantic about community nor dismissive of medicine and technology. Instead, he seems interested in the tensions between them and in what those tensions reveal about how we have come to understand health, care and expertise.

His thinking is also rooted in a recognition that many of the questions social prescribing raises are not new. Ideas of reciprocity, belonging, collective care and relationship have deep histories across communities and cultures. Perhaps the challenge is not to invent something entirely new, but to understand what has been lost, what has changed, and what might be possible to recover.

In this Connecting Conversations, Hamaad takes us into some of those questions, exploring social prescribing and the meaning of care in an age of technocracy.

I hope you enjoy the read, 

Sîan

Social Prescribing and the Meaning of Care in the Age of Technocracy 

by Hamaad Ahmad Khan 

We have never had more tools to measure health and rarely felt less cared for. Our health systems can sequence a genome, model a population, and optimise clinical pathways, and still leave a person sitting in a waiting room feeling unseen. This is the strange condition of medicine in an age of technocracy: an abundance of data, and a poverty of meaning.

I spend a lot of my time asking a simple question. Where is the health in our health system, and where is the care in our healthcare? The more I ask it, the more I believe the two have quietly come apart. Care has been reorganised and repackaged into an entirely different thing – industrial healthcare. What we now value in productivity and efficiency, we lose in the slow, steady work of relational care.

Social prescribing matters because it refuses that logic. It returns to something older than the clinic - care as a relational act, rooted in the personal and the particular. Starting not with what is the matter with you, but with what matters to you, is more than a friendly reframing. It restores the person to the centre of their own care and recovers a language of health that our institutions have almost forgotten how to speak.

Alongside medical school, I spend two days a week as NASP's International Development Associate, where I help support the International Social Prescribing Collaborative, our six-weekly knowledge-sharing platform now bringing together policymakers and practitioners from more than 40 countries. I have sat across the table with delegations from Nigeria, Japan, Denmark, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, hosted learning visits in London, and worked alongside health ministries and system leaders in a good many more countries than I ever expected to when I started. What has struck me most, across all of it, is how consistent the underlying ask is. Whether the health ministry official is from Seoul or Lagos, the question is rarely "does this work?" because the evidence increasingly speaks for itself. It is "how do we build the relationships, workforce, and trust needed to make it last?" That is not a technical problem. It is a human one, and it is why convening — the slow, patient work of getting the right people in the same room, repeatedly, until they trust each other enough to build something together — has become as central to this field.

Alongside that convening work, I have spent much of this year leading a multi-country study into how social prescribing systems are actually built. We have gathered data from more than thirty countries, run structured interviews with practitioners and policymakers, and are validating an international framework for profiling how far a country's social prescribing system has developed.

Throughout my time in medical school, I have watched brilliant clinicians run ten-minute appointments with people whose real presenting complaint was loneliness, debt, or a home that was making them ill - and watched the system have no box to tick for any of it. Training as a doctor while working in social prescribing has made it impossible for me to unsee how much of what we call "complex need" is really just unmet relational need, held up in clinical language because that is the only vocabulary and currency.

Long before health became a technocracy, communities everywhere knew how to hold one another well, through kinship, ritual, shared work, and the tending of a place. Those relational ways of caring are not soft additions to real medicine. They are the original technology of health, and every culture has its own. At its best, this work listens back to that knowledge. It does not import a novel intervention. It re-values the acts of care that were always there - which is, I think, the real lesson of convening 40-plus countries around the same table: nobody is starting from zero, they are all rediscovering something.

I hope that we come to recognise social prescribing as work toward health justice. The burdens of loneliness, exclusion, and unmet need do not fall evenly. They gather where power and resources are thinnest. To prescribe connection, agency, and belonging in places of most need is to redistribute something clinical medicine alone cannot. The ultimate prescription is health justice. 

About Hamaad:

Part of the world I live: I live in South West London and work across East London and Essex.

Occupation: Graduate medical student, also working at the National Academy for Social Prescribing.

What makes you well? Moments where time slips away and focus deepens. I find a real serenity in solitude.

Why is social prescribing important? It reaches the parts of our health that clinical care cannot, and reminds us that care is relational before it is clinical.

Your favourite nature-based space? The West Highlands of Scotland. I hiked there four or five years ago and have never quite left.

Your favourite music? All kinds, though lately I have been drawn to solo piano and solo saxophone pieces. There is something about a single instrument saying everything.

Your favourite pastime? Working on my podcast Medicine Unheard. We have a new season of guests talking about mental health, colonial psychiatry, living with disabilities, and more. I've enjoyed speaking to and learning from all the guests, and further developing a critical space on how we can better medicine for all.

If you had one wish for social prescribing, what would it be? For it to be recognised as work toward health justice. The ultimate prescription is health justice.