Avon and Wildlife Trust

The NHS is in crisis. If we don't fundamentally change the way we both think about health care and deliver health care, we will not have an NHS in ten years' time. One way of doing that, which everybody here today is supporting, is to make sure that we utilise the benefits that the natural environment can bring to health and wellbeing. So we've teamed up together with the Nature Partnerships and Public Health England to all work collaboratively on this event today.

So today we've had health professionals and environmentalists talking about the importance of health thinking outside the box, investing in natural capital, our own natural life support systems. So we stop people getting in, we stop places flooding, we stop people having problems about respiration and pollution and actually we build healthier places for people to live. So there's less people having to use those services and more people who are just feeling great about their lives and that of their kids. Sustainability and transformation plan footprints, these STP footprints are really important to the health service because they bring together other partners such as social care and third sector organisations, the very groups who are here today at our conference on green spaces to try and make that contribution to keeping us healthy and use alternative ways of helping us recover from mental health.

Well the 48 Local Nature Partnerships in England were set up in order to make links between the environmental sector, the health sector and the economy and we believe really strongly that a healthy population depends on a healthy environment and vice versa. For us at NHS England and our partners in Public Health England we recognise that prevention of illness is much better than cure and we're really using this conference today to explore how green spaces can play their part in helping us stay healthy and preventing ill health. The health sector should value the natural environment because by disconnecting from the environment you're creating an unhealthy and sedentary population. By investing in green infrastructure, beautiful spaces in the cities, then you will reap the benefits for years to come.

As a young person with Asperger's and depression I have had many positive interactions with the natural environment. I have two dogs and owning dogs comes with responsibility such as walking them and walking my dogs has led to a significant improvement within my wellbeing. My physical wellbeing, my mental wellbeing comes out to my mood and also my ability to socially function amongst society. So a day like today seems to provide a really good opportunity for conversations that wouldn't otherwise happen.

Between people who are worried about sustainable healthcare and the natural environment, how can we help each other? Where are our interests overlapping? How can we develop better nature-based mental health services and how can we develop better public health provisions for people to get the benefits out of nature? So on a personal level I feel increasingly committed to being proactive and positive in my thinking and my own behaviours around sustainability and engaging with nature.

And professionally to open up conversations with partners and colleagues so that we can really move this agenda forward. I've been a GP for 26 years and the workload is spiraling. We need to work differently and work does an increasing year on year so working with community groups, working with nature groups has to be the refolder. The product I got out today was the need to have both top-down approaches and grassroots approaches and the best session I thought was from Manchester where we were in the community authority improving this policy from the top-down.

Also in Bristol where they're trying to do the same from the grassroots. This is the start of a journey in which we're all going to work together using the wonderful examples we've heard today to collaborate in a way that builds a new system of healthcare and supporting wellbeing for the benefit of both the whole population and the NHS.