Above left to right: Oliver Harmar, Natural England Chief Operating Officer, Tracy Metcalf, Senior Occupational Health Therapist, and Therese Patten, Chief Executive at Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, planting trees on one of our sites
attending the Canal and River Trust’ s own community programme on discharge.
Following on from this successful programme, we looked at what could be done out in nature, on our actual canals and rivers.
The Canal and River Trust runs a separate programme with an emphasis on physical health, funded by Sport England. In December 2024, together we arranged to put on a canoe taster session that nine service users and five members of staff attended, with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
As a result, we arranged an eight-week programme to run from March, alternating between walking and canoeing each week, all facilitated by the Canal and River Trust.
Each session attracted between eight and 12 service users; some attended every session and others preferred to drop in when they could, and both service users and staff reported how much it had helped their mental health.
Other partnerships
We are fortunate, as a trust, to be so close to the Yorkshire Dales, and it had been an aim from the start to investigate how we can utilise this nature resource for our service users benefit.
The Yorkshire National Park Authority has been a fantastic partner to make this a reality, and it has facilitated a walk for several of our community mental health teams, whose service users from these more urban areas have less access to green spaces.
One of the most well-received activities we have undertaken with our community service users has been a tree planting day, in collaboration with local green organisation YorGreenCIC.
Nine service users attended, with seven members of staff, to plant over 300 trees above the village of Silsden, just outside of Keighley. This was part of a wider community project to plant thousands of trees, also in collaboration with the Woodland Trust.
Inpatient wards
We have two inpatient hospitals within the trust, Lynfield Mount and Airedale Centre for Mental Health( ACMH). At the start of the project the inpatient wards were the easier place to get things up and running, as the wards had courtyards available to immediately start working in and the service users were all there, in the same place.
However, we have had to think about the activities people can access on the inpatient site and managing risk; it hasn’ t been possible to deliver activities such as the canoeing sessions and trips to the Yorkshire Dales.
Both these inpatient groups incorporate a mixture of nature activities, mostly centred around gardening and walking, which encourage getting out into nature, but also include other nature activities done indoors, such as seed planting, nature arts and crafts and nature bingo. Suzanne Williamson, an OT at the Airedale Centre for Mental Health commented:‘ Inpatient mental health wards can feel very clinical and adopting our outside spaces for nature-based therapeutic interventions provides escapism from this.
‘ These activities also promote behaviour activation opportunities, where our service users see improvements in their wellbeing and are given the opportunity to continue within this occupation after discharge with connections to CMHT pathways.’
Virtual reality
One challenge we had from the beginning was how we engage service users in nature who either can’ t leave the ward or are reluctant to. One novel solution to this was using virtual reality( VR).
We’ d met a company that was developing a VR programme for an NHS trust in London. This was specifically designed to be used with its dementia patients, but the programme itself involved the user sitting in a virtual nature setting.
They had four different nature settings they could choose from, and we were fortunate enough that the VR company lent us a headset with the programme installed for us to try out. Over several months, we trialled this with service users in a range of inpatient settings. The results were overwhelmingly positive, with our
20 OTnews September 2025