Speaker
Description
Introduction/purpose
Social prescribing (SP) involves a person being referred into a non-pharmacological community based intervention by a healthcare professional to support their health and wellbeing. In the UK and beyond, SP is expanding rapidly and garnering policy and research attention. Nature Based Social Prescribing (NBSP), involves a component of nature and has potential to affect ecological as well as human outcomes which should be recognised in evaluation and planning of NBSP.
Methods
The five key principles of the One Health perspective (equity between different sectors and disciplines, parity between different groups, environmental stewardship, transdisciplinarity and equilibrium of interactions between animals, the environment and humans) are applied to develop the NaBSPEP (Nature Based Social Prescribing Evaluation Pathways) model, showing six interacting causal pathways that can be used in the evaluation of NBSP.
Results
Using the six causal pathways in NaBSPEP model, current evidence is presented, showing the outcomes for each of pathways of influence between NBSP with animal, environmental and human health and wellbeing outcomes.
Conclusions & Recommendations
Typically, evaluations of social prescribing take an anthropocentric viewpoint looking at the ways that nature can support human health. This model of NBSP evaluation takes an ecological justice and posthumanist perspective to understand the important and reciprocal relationships that can exist between NBSP with animal, environmental and human health. In so doing this shows how human health interventions can support human and ecological health and contribute to the sustainability agenda.
