By Dr Duika Burges Watson, CSH Nature Recovery Ranger at The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Last week, some staff and patients took their shoes off on the grass.
Not all of them.
It was a joint event with Jaswinder Singh, one of our chaplains, and three musicians who had come from India to teach at Newcastle’s Sikh community. They sat and played. Patients, visitors and staff came and went – security staff, the two men who care for every bed in the hospital, the Director of Public Health. Some stayed five minutes. Some stayed ten. Some stood and watched from a distance, said they didn’t have time, or didn’t want to be seen to be taking time out. Jas invited us to take our shoes off – grounding, he said. Some people could manage the music. Some the meditation. Some took their shoes off and sat on the blanket. Some lay down. Some stood. People found their own level of stepping out of themselves.
Jas reflected afterwards: “Taking our shoes off wasn’t just about grounding physically. It was also an invitation to leave behind, even briefly, our roles, titles and the pressures we carry. Music, meditation and nature all have the potential to reconnect us with ourselves and with one another. It wasn’t intended as a performance or an activity, but simply creating a space where people felt they had permission to pause.”
Everyone who took part said the same things. “I needed that.” “We should do this more often.” “I can’t believe that was only five minutes.”
Time does strange things when you let it slow down.
I’ve been thinking about time cultures in healthcare for a long time – longer than this job. About fifteen years ago I spent two weeks in Los Angeles fire stations, talking to paramedics about a stroke trial. The study asked whether a treatment delivered in the field, before the patient reached hospital, could save brain tissue and change outcomes permanently. Time is brain – that’s not a slogan, it’s a physiological fact. You’d think paramedics would leap at it.
But the culture of pre-hospital emergency care is built entirely around speed: get to the patient, get to the hospital. Everything else registers as delay. My co-authors and I wrote about this in 2012:¹ even the most research-enthusiastic paramedics described time-critical imperatives as the primary obstacle. The intensity of their orientation to time was unlike anything we found in other clinical groups. Other activities were possible only “if time permits.”
I see the same pattern on the ward. Not among paramedics, but among the staff whose work is least visible and most relentless – domestics, porters, catering workers, healthcare assistants. Breaks registered as a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be used. Smoking and vaping excepted. You can take five minutes to do something bad for your health. You cannot always take five minutes to stand on grass.
This is not a criticism of individuals. It is a structural problem and a cultural one. Our 2025 staff survey (n=243) found that 52% of trust staff feel they don’t have sufficient time to access green spaces during their working day.² The half-hour lunch break is often not long enough to queue for food and make it outside.
What last week showed me is that the time is often there. What isn’t always there is the permission – and permission, it turns out, needs a person to give it. Jas created a container: music, an invitation, a reason to stop that didn’t feel like slacking. Without that, the grass is just grass. With it, five minutes becomes something people carry through the rest of their day.³
We need to change the time culture in healthcare. But culture doesn’t change through policy alone. It changes when someone like Jas puts musicians on the grass and says: come, take your shoes off, you’re allowed.
- Burges Watson DI et al. Evidence from the scene: paramedic perspectives on involvement in out-of-hospital research. Ann Emerg Med 2012; 60(5): 641-50.
- Newcastle Hospitals Staff Wellbeing Survey 2025 (n=243). Unpublished internal data, Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
- Basu A, Duvall J and Kaplan R. Attention restoration theory: exploring the role of soft fascination and mental bandwidth. Environment and Behavior 2019; 51(9): 1152-1173. Peifer C et al. A scoping review of flow research. Frontiers in Psychology 2022; 13: 815665.