GO GREEN FOR WELLBEING?
Gardening is being prescribed by doctors for for its health benefits, but more needs to be done to make it a truly therapeutic resource
Gardening has been identified by the medical profession as having wide-ranging benefits for physical and mental health. Now doctors are increasingly recommending it as part of the NHS ‘social prescribing’ activities.
Social prescribing – sometimes referred to as community referral
– is a means of enabling healthcare professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services (typically provided by voluntary and community sector organisations). It recognises that people’s health is determined by a range of social, economic and environmental factors, and seeks to address people’s needs in a holistic way.
Availability issue
A new trial is currently underway that will see young people, aged 11-18, offered gardening, alongside other activities, such as sport, dancing, roller skating and surfing, to see whether taking part could reduce anxious and depressive feelings. The NHS will first offer these activities to 600 young people, in 10 parts of England, who are on their waiting lists for care. If the trial is successful, the scheme could then be rolled out across England, to help the thousands of young people on the waiting list for formal care.
However, any rollout by government using gardening as a preferred prescription option is likely to find itself hampered by patchy availability of horticultural venues able to fulfil the wide range of needs, as well as chronic shortfalls in funding, with ventures often run by a largely volunteer workforce.
“In our gardens, everything we do is focussed on health and wellbeing and on most of our programmes we design our work to support the achievement of specific outcomes in relation to each client gardener’s health,” said Damien Newman, Training, Education and Consultancy Manager at Thrive, a horticultural therapy charity based in Reading. “We believe, and evidence suggests, to maximise the benefits for people, a skilled practitioner makes a big difference. Each time our charity is referred a new person we have to subsidise this through fundraising, perhaps achievable within a charity like ours, but probably not sustainable in many others. The progress of social prescription within healthcare varies drastically across different parts of the country and this also needs equalising.”
Funding needed
Damien’s view is echoed by general practitioner Dr Richard Claxton, also a keen gardener and garden designer based in Tonbridge, Kent. “In many areas there are no gardens where there is real need or deprivation and currently no meaningful investment. There is an awful long way to go to see sufficient gardens run on financially sustainable lines, integrated into social care.”
Dr Claxton has personally produced the Gardening4Health
Directory that profiles around 500 gardens or providers of social and horticultural therapy across England, Northern Ireland and Wales. Services and venues in Scotland are served by horticultural therapy charity, Trellis.
Both Damien and Richard foresee serious issues for the future if funding for therapy centres is reduced or withdrawn, particularly in the current economic climate.
Damien added: ”The pandemic has caused a slowing of progress in the on-boarding of social prescription across GP services and no doubt the current crisis within NHS and the government will do the same.”
For more details, visit www.gardening4health.co.uk; www.trellisscotland.org.uk; and www.thrive.org.uk.