Abstract
The South Eastern Health & Social Trust (SET) provides a service to a population of over 350,000.
Central to improving health & wellbeing and contributing to reducing health inequalities is innovation, service improvement and excellence by working in partnership and collaboration both internal and external to the organisation.
The SET Outdoors Service is one of SET key priorities in the Population Health Strategy 2021-24 which is underpinned by Regional Strategic Drivers such as Making Life Better: A Whole System Strategic Framework for Public Health 2013-23, Health and Wellbeing 2026: Delivering Together and the South Eastern H&SC Trust Quality 4 All Strategy 2021-26
South Eastern H&SC Trust Population Health Strategy three key priority areas:
In December 2020 a steering group was established to design and implement a new and innovative service SET Outdoors
The aim of SET Outdoors is to support SET staff who routinely deliver healthcare services to children, to improve the health, wellbeing and quality of life of service users via engagement in purposeful, nature-based and/or animal facilitated outdoor activities and/or outdoor therapy. This is achieved via the co-production of a variety of healthcare interventions that utilise outdoor, sports-based, nature-based and/or animal facilitated activities as a therapeutic medium.
The Outdoor Mental Health Interventions Model Richards, Hardie & Anderson, 2019
SET Outdoors has collaborated with twenty outdoor and/or animal-facilitated activity providers to deliver programmes such as sailing, paddle boarding, sea swimming, athletics, adventure therapy, donkey, alpaca and equine therapy, drumming and forest school.
Each programme has a set of quality measures evaluating the impact of the programme on the young people and also the healthcare staff. Outcome measures included the use of the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Health Scale (WEMWBS) participant surveys, parent surveys and staff feedback. The overall assessments revealed improvement in confidence, fitness, and ability to socialise, and attend mental health appointments. Staff reported young people being better to manage anxiety through the experience of outdoor activity and facing fears. Parents praised the programmes citing the connections their children made and new skills learnt.
Other measurement tools used is the Beck Anxiety Inventory for Youth ( BAI) (Beck et al, 2005) is a self-reported tool widely used in research to monitor the responsiveness of interventions the BAI has been used in programme delivery with each participants at sessions 1 and after session 8
This programme highlights a holistic approach to health and wellbeing understanding the wider determinants of health and partnering across sectors to enrich service delivery across the South Eastern HSC Trust via nature-based therapeutic activity and therapy, but also to inspire individual staff and teams to establish permanent changes to core service delivery.