Table 3.

Reasons for asking patients about their socioeconomic circumstances

Reasons	Citations
Reasons relating to individual healthcare encounters
Clinicians can refer patients to social resources	[10, 16–38]
Clinicians can engage directly with patients’ social needs	[18, 34, 39, 40]
Clinicians can acknowledge patients’ socially-determined risk of disease (specifically cardiovascular disease risk)	[41–49] ( [16, 23, 35, 50–52])
More clinical resources can be allocated to patients facing adverse social conditions	[26, 42, 53–57]
Clinical management plans can be adapted to patients’ socioeconomic context	[11, 16, 32, 38, 58–70]
Clinicians can better understand non-adherence to management plans	[26, 58, 66, 71, 72]
Communication and relationships can be improved between patients and clinicians	[54, 73–76]
Patient preferences	[27, 77, 78]
Reasons relating to health service provision and organisation
Healthcare use by different socioeconomic groups can be better monitored	[26, 31, 43, 79–89]
More healthcare resources can be allocated to populations with greater need	[35, 90–93]
Healthcare services can be better adapted to population needs	[10, 16, 23, 26, 32, 42, 43, 60, 68, 87, 92, 94]
Deprivation payments can be more accurately allocated	[55, 82, 90, 95–97]
Reasons relating to population-level research and policies
Health research can be improved	[13, 16, 35, 45, 46, 60, 73, 82, 89, 98–104]
Public health policies can be better-informed	[10, 23, 32, 42, 44, 57, 66, 81, 105–107]
Health and social care can be better integrated	[29, 31, 101]