Alison is the Research and Training Lead for Quality Improvement at Oxford Health. Here she shares her experience of having accessible green spaces, including one of the UK’s ‘Tiny Forests’, at the NHS site where she works.
“On office-based days, I don’t always get the chance for a morning walk and by lunchtime I’m feeling the pull of the outdoors. Tucked away behind the administrative and clinical buildings is one of Oxford’s ‘Tiny Forests’, urban plots specially planted with fast-growing trees and designed as low maintenance to bring healthy engagement with nature to local communities. They have been incorporated as part of moves by the NHS to transform its infrastructure and radically reconsider its approach to care. At my workplace, you could easily miss the Tiny Forest if you went straight from the car park to your desk and dashed off again at the end of the day. But it is worth a visit. There is a path cut through tall grasses that takes you on a meandering route down towards the pond and there are bijou meadow-flower beds filled with juicy splashes of poppies and linseed. Sometimes I see other people sat eating sandwiches under the larger, more established trees.
“I have a friend in Gloucestershire who has always had ‘green fingers, but in the last few years has found her niche as an award-winning garden designer and a grounds manager for the NHS. Her work promoting green spaces around hospital sites is important and inspiring: these lovely gardens and patches of growth have been shown to help recovery rates for patients and improve the wellbeing of staff and visitors. A carefully planted nook can bring some sense of peace for the bereaved or a moment of respite for the terminally ill, escape from what can sometimes feel like a painfully enclosed world of medical care.
“The NHS, alongside other civic institutions such as schools, universities and local authorities, hold a massive amount of real estate across the country and to some extent have the potential to revolutionise our built environment. I’ve been learning about innovative sites and programmes where healthcare has been purposefully tied to sustainable biodiversity. For example, the incredible Children’s Health Campus at Alder Hey that is integrated into parkland, uses natural materials where possible in its interior design, and provides bedroom views and ward play decks so that children who have to remain inside can still experience the outdoors in other ways. Or more modest projects like Sounds Wild, which bring multi-sensory therapies to learning disabled people in outdoor contexts, ensuring rich encounters with nature rather than just passive ones (like being pushed around a lake via an accessible pathway).
“There is a growing recognition and evidence that the treatment of many common conditions – from mental health issues to problems with mobility – can benefit from physical immersion in nature, participation in activities like gardening, or the opportunity to engage with wildlife. Tiny Forests, hospital gardens, healthy walking trails: these initiatives also help to build connections between people who work in, visit and live alongside healthcare facilities. On my last lunchtime stroll I bumped into a colleague from Estates I’d not met before. He told me about his involvement in creating the D-Day display of silhouetted figures woven into the ‘no mow’ patch at the back of the field, and how the Tiny Forest needs more volunteers to help maintain it. We chatted about our daily routines, about shared frustrations, about why more staff don’t wander outdoors at lunchtimes.”