As urbanisation accelerates and our lives become increasingly digital, a quiet revolution is taking place in healthcare. Green social prescribing – the practice of connecting people with nature-based activities to improve mental health and wellbeing – is emerging as a powerful tool in modern medicine. In our latest episode of “We All Need Nature,” we had the privilege of speaking with one of the field’s most insightful voices, Sam Pywell.

Leading the Social Prescribing Unit at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), Sam brings a unique perspective to this growing movement. Her unit stands at the intersection of academic research and practical application, working tirelessly to understand and enhance the impact of nature-based interventions on mental health.

What makes Sam’s insights particularly valuable is her remarkable journey. Before entering academia, she worked as an outdoor education instructor, experiencing firsthand the transformative power of nature. This personal connection to the outdoors, combined with her academic expertise, gives her a holistic understanding of how green social prescribing can bridge the gap between traditional healthcare and natural healing.

In our conversation, Sam delves deep into the practicalities of implementing green social prescribing programmes. She discusses everything from securing sustainable funding through innovative channels to measuring success in ways that go beyond traditional metrics. Her approach emphasises the importance of individual stories and achievements – whether that’s someone regularly attending a community garden group or finding the confidence to embark on solo nature walks.

The episode offers invaluable insights for healthcare professionals, community organisers, and anyone interested in the healing potential of nature. Sam’s passionate advocacy for nature-based healing, combined with her academic rigour, presents a compelling case for why we need to rethink our relationship with the natural world and its role in maintaining mental health.

As our world grapples with increasing mental health challenges, Sam’s work at UCLan’s Social Prescribing Unit shines a light on a promising path forward. By reconnecting people with nature through structured, supported programmes, we may find answers to some of our most pressing healthcare questions.

Listen to the full episode to discover how this growing movement is helping people rediscover their connection to nature – and themselves – one prescription at a time. Sam’s insights will leave you with a deeper appreciation for the healing power of the natural world and practical knowledge about how we can harness it for better mental health outcomes.

Want to learn more about green social prescribing or share your own story of nature-based healing? Reach out to us – we’d love to hear from you and feature your experiences in future episodes.

Neil:

​​Green social prescribing is one of the fastest growing areas of social prescribing. It’s a way of connecting people to nature-based activities to improve their mental health and well-being. And of course, I’m a great believer. 

Green social prescribing works on a very simple principle. We as human beings are creatures of nature and we benefit greatly from spending time outdoors in natural habitats. It’s a fundamental part of our development. We are nature. But in the modern world, some of us have forgotten this. For many different reasons, being outside in nature is becoming increasingly difficult for some people. Work, busy lives, family commitments, urban environments, they all prevent us from taking time out. to get our dose of nature. Many of us don’t have enough nature in our lives. So, doctors and health professionals are now prescribing access to the outdoors as an alternative treatment.

My name is Neil Hickson and welcome to We All Need Nature, a podcast dedicated to green social prescribing or GSP for short. I’m not a doctor or a psychologist. My knowledge comes from observation and from my own lived exper experience of founding and running a community farm in rural Lancashire for over 10 years now. But I’ve also learned a lot from my own research and through talking to experts and those whose lives have been changed for the better by reconnecting with nature. 

I believe we all need nature, and that’s the name of this podcast. 

It was last year and I can’t remember how this came about but Sam Pywell of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) visited our site at Burscough Community Farm with one of her MSC students to see what we were up to and how the farm worked. It was only during a conversation with Sam in our poly tunnel later that I learned what Sam actually did. At that point, she told me she headed the social prescribing unit at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston. I was blown away. What surprised me was I didn’t even know there’s such a thing as the social prescribing unit even existed. 

I don’t know why, but I’ve always felt the need to have to prove that social prescribing works and helps people. So, finding out that Uclan have actually set up a department researching and teaching social prescribing adds another level of validity of social prescribing to me and its place within our mental health world. So, it was great that Sam agreed for me to interview her at Uclan in Preston. And let me ask her all about social prescribing unit, its work, her work and what inspires her. 

I started by asking Sam how the social prescribing unit was founded.

Sam:

It was pre-covid. So um a couple of my colleagues formed a steering group and had this idea that it wouldn’t it would be really good to create research and knowledge exchange and teaching all about social prescribing. They could see it was an agenda that’s emerged. um both nationally and internationally. So it’s not just um in England, it’s happening across the the whole of the world and it’s happening at different rates as well. And in in the UK, social prescribing is just going from strength to strength. It continues to grow. A lot of it continues to be focused on communitydriven assets and uh there is a lot to do with green social prescribing and nature-based social prescribing as well. So I think it had really sparked my colleagues interest because they are um very passionate about the strengths of communities and the strengths that we can all bring to health creation. And from that they formed a steering committee and from that they managed to get some funding to employ me in post and from there I started to create the unit with help from many colleagues across the university.

Neil:

Sam’s unit is doing really valuable research work. Not only are involved in teaching and training new social prescribers. They’re also actively involved in research. 

Sam:

We focus mainly around teaching knowledge exchange and research as well. So for example, we have a PhD that has just been released all about sustainable models of nature-based social prescribing. We also do research at M’s level. So we teach a master’s level in social prescribing as in a module, a 20 credit module that’s distance learning. And we teach um quite a few colleagues teach into uh BSC degree level courses on social prescribing as well. So we teach at all educational levels. Um we have colleagues that teach on apprenticeships for social prescribing link workers. But that’s not the only thing we do. We do work with variety of organisations, a variety of um both grassroots and large organisations to try to understand what they want to be researched. Um Once we understand that whether it’s for the purpose of commissioning, recommissioning or for creating something new, we then create research projects. We have one at the moment which is with colleagues in Norway and we have a variety of um projects with local colleagues trying to understand a little bit more about the outcomes of social prescribing in medicine who volunteer with us on a variety of projects. And we also have uh colleagues that teach into medical and courses as well. So we have colleagues that are very active in terms of research and um teaching that teach in public health and public health is something that you can learn as a doctor, as an allied health profession. You can learn it as a nurse as well. So you can learn it from a variety of different professions, different angles. So social prescribing can feature within courses. I’m doing some research at the moment based on how it it is a little bit difficult really pin down how to teach it effectively and how to teach it inclusively because as we know it’s so it it’s confusing. I tried to do a map of um social prescribing for students and it is it’s really it’s actually really difficult to draw out and that’s just thinking about that’s your map. Those are your connections. If you tried to map the whole of the UK or the whole of the world it’s impossible because there’s so many people involved. 

Neil:

The rapid and organic growth of social prescribing makes it difficult to track. There are so many different individuals and organisations involved. It’s been hard to map out this world and see where we, as a prescribing supplier, fit in to this confusing landscape. As Sam explains, a key challenge for social prescribers is collecting data that accurately demonstrates the benefits of social prescribing programs. This data is needed to persuade commissioners to fund and support social prescribing.

Sam:

I think there will always be the need to provide things like a cost-benefit case or a social return on investment case. So there’s always going to be the need to prove to commissioners possibly for commissioning or recommissioning exactly what’s happened during that intervention. And again, it’s whether you call social prescribing an intervention or not. Some people don’t recognize it as an intervention. So what what is this thing that you have done out in nature what has happened for that individual so that’s where we start to talk about well-being measures and things like the ONS4 the weebs really short questionnaires but it relies on people completing them and I don’t know about you I don’t like completing questionnaires I tend to delete those emails or those messages but actually that’s the only way that we’re going to get some data we can get data through interviews, through focus groups. There are many different ways of getting data, but to get those results from well-being questionnaires or um from the person’s perspective, we we need those responses to be able to do the research from it. But that’s that’s incredibly difficult, isn’t it? If you either not in the right place to spend your energy on doing that or if you if you really don’t like or you don’t agree with research. Some people don’t agree with research either. There’s many different points of view on that. But yeah, I do think in terms of supporting the agenda, the best thing we can do is look at outcomes. The best thing we can do is is try to build that research picture. Success can appear in many ways, can’t it? It can appear as an individual regularly turning up at a group or an individual attending once having an epiphany and going on to volunteer or going on to lead other groups themselves. So success is not just numbers, is it?

Neil:

I asked Sam for any information about the ideal length of a social prescribing intervention. Sam says a 12week course or something similar could work well to establish new habits.

Sam:

I’ve not found it personally, but I I can understand where that’s come from. So you you hear about 6, 10, 12 week courses. Um so to help an individual maintain a pattern of behavior. I can see how that that would help. So that regular space in the diary at the same time, similar activity. So you can see it forming patterns and habits which hopefully become behaviors longer term. So I can understand that. I asked Sam for any advice she could give me for improving our own green social prescribing offer. How could we gain traction and put ourselves on the social prescribing landscape? Gosh, there’s loads of things. I know funding’s always on your radar. So, certainly networking, making connections, trying to understand what other organisations have done, what other charities have done, and seeing whether any of that work works for yourself and your ethos, exploring multiple routes for for funding as well. So, we we’ve just started doing some research on sustainable models of social prescribing in nature-based activities. And there is something about looking for those non-traditional routes, those um I think they call them philanthropic avenues which haven’t been discovered and haven’t been harnessed in this way before. So getting a regular funding from a certain direction. I know I know there’s talk about the biodiversity net gain grants at the moment, but they do tie you into sort of a 30-year contract. So there’s pros and cons of anything that you look at from the NHS side. Individuals who receive personal health budgets and who have care plans and who have on their care plan their goal is to get out in nature or their goal is to be outside. It might be possible to get funding from people’s personal health budgets to pay for things like transport to community groups like yourselves to pay for the activities to pay for resources to pay for a carer or to pay for you know a PA just some kind of support if that ind ual needed it to be able to attend the group and I think that’s something that’s not well known at all the PHBs. So charities community groups can actually advertise we take PHBs.

Neil:

Sam offers some good advice for social prescribing organisations looking to secure funding. It’s a question of networking, building relationships, and exploring all possible funding avenues.

Sam:

I’ve learned so much from coming out to see you guys. It’s been the site tour, listening to the fantastic work that you do, I’ve learned an awful lot and I think that’s something that I’d encourage for colleagues listening is you need to actually get out there yourselves. You need to get your wellies on. You need to go for the site tour. You know, we had a lovely cup of tea, didn’t we? In that poly tunnel and with the fire roaring away, it’s very difficult to understand what the offer is, what the site is, what the potential is of the work that you do without actually going out and visiting. So I think that’s something that um some colleagues miss at times. They think they could just look at a website and understand. I always like to ask my guests what their experience of nature is and if it’s changed their lives in any way. In this next section of the interview, Sam explains how and why being in nature became important to her.

Sam:

So in terms of my own personal nature connection, I Yes, I’ve always been encouraged to be out in nature right from, you know, back in the day summer holidays and everything a little bit, entertain yourself, go off with your group of friends. Um, we used to play on the land that was around us. We used to climb trees. That went into a very serious relationship for me with nature as in I wanted it to become my career. I went into being an outdoor ed instructor. I was outside every day helping other people understand a little bit about the nature around them but also taking part in adventurous activities as well. My health suffered at one point my mental health looking back it’s quite easy to connect that to four briements within a short space of time. It’s it’s so easy to see it isn’t it in retrospect what’s actually happened. But the thing that I didn’t realize was how much being outside and being close to nature or being with people outside doing activities does make me well. And I didn’t return to that properly until I’d had kids. So after after my first was born, I needed to get outside. It was so hard to get outside with a little one. So hard. But you have to pack as if you’re going on holiday for a couple of weeks. It was absolutely ridiculous. And I just found it really overwhelming. But when I was outside, it really benefited.

Neil:

There are often times when we get trapped by all our commitments in life. We push ourselves to the back of the queue when it comes to self-care. This is where social prescribing comes in. Sam herself benefited from someone else’s guidance when she was dealing with the struggles of becoming a young mother.

Sam:

There was a fitness instructor who did something called Boogie Fit at the time and she used to start at one of the community centers and take a group of new moms with the pounds with the babies and all the rucks sacks and everything and take us to a local park and do exercises in the park and then come back to the community center and have a cup of tea, have a banana and have a bit of a chat. And that was just such a massive lifeline. But it it was the the getting outside bit that was really big because it was very much building strength back in yourself to know it was possible to go outside. It sounds Silly, doesn’t it? But it is safe. And you know, we were out in all weathers. We we used to be out doing exercises when it was icy, when it was snowy, etc. And I think that being outside, that really solidified. That’s so important for my health and also for my children’s health. Fast forward to the pandemic and all of us have that experience, don’t we? We all have that experience of needing to get out of the house, making the most of that time. that we had where we were allowed to be outside. Um, and I think those two main experiences have just left me with actually I need to get my kids outside. I need to go out. We need we need to go to the park. We need to play. We need to get muddy. Um, we need to take part in as many activities as we can outside because I’m now responsible for building their nature connection and that has helped me over the years and it’s been something that I’ve come back to.

Neil:

So there you have it. Social prescribing is now represented by its own department at a major university. It’s on the map. A valid and expanding treatment for some of our modern day ills. We need to put nature back into people’s lives. So more power to UCLan and the good work that Sam and her team do. For me though, there were three big takeaways from our chat. First, social prescribing is definitely on the rise, but it’s still finding its feet. Sam explained how different regions are adopting it at their own pace, and there’s still some confusion about what it actually means. This really shows why we need everyone involved from healthcare providers to community groups to work together and communicate clearly. The second thing that really struck me was about measuring success. It’s not just just about the numbers. Sam made a great point about looking at individual stories and achievements. Success might mean someone regularly showing up at a community garden group, feeling confident enough to go on nature walks by themselves, or even inspiring their friends to get involved. It’s all about helping people to take charge of their own well-being. And finally, Sam shared some advice about keeping these programs running. We need to build connections, working with local organisations, citizens advice, council for voluntary services, and exploring different funding options like personal health budgets. You’ve got to be creative and entrepreneurial to make these nature-based programs last. I think anyone working in green social prescribing or just interested in learning more about it will find Sam’s insights valuable and how much social prescribing is becoming more mainstream. If your life has been changed by rediscovering nature, why don’t you get in touch? I’d love to hear from you and maybe help tell your story so others can benefit from your experience. Email neilene.com and let’s have a chat. I’m Neil Hickson and this is the We All Need Nature podcast. Thanks for listening and why don’t you check out the next episode.