Beyond Hospital Walls: Green Spaces, Healing Places

In this special Green Health Week episode, we explore NHS Ayrshire & Arran's groundbreaking approach to healthcare environments. Join us as we discover how hospital grounds are being transformed into therapeutic sanctuaries benefiting patients, staff and the local community.

Public Health Programme Lead Elaine Caldow takes us on a remarkable journey—from a small demonstration project to a comprehensive approach that treats nature as medicine. 

We hear from Helen Gemmell, Assistant Director of Estates and Support Services, who shares how initial management concerns about risk have blossomed into widespread enthusiasm among staff for these restorative green spaces.

Our visit to the Kyle Chemotherapy Unit with Deputy Charge Nurse Wendy Ruiz de Pascal reveals how thoughtfully designed gardens are supporting patients during their treatment journeys, while Lindsay Twilley introduces us to The Conservation Volunteers' innovative initiatives—from 'green gyms' to guided nature walks that reconnect people with the outdoors.

This episode showcases Scotland's pioneering integration of nature into healthcare settings, creating environments that foster calm, hope and healing while advancing crucial sustainability goals. The evidence is clear: when hospitals make space for nature, remarkable healing happens.

Information:

NatureScot – NHS Greenspace 

NatureScot – The benefits of Green Health 

NatureScot - Realising the Potential of Scotland's Natural Health Service in Practice 

The Conservation Volunteers – Scotland

Green gym and nature walks on NHS Ayrshire & Arran sites

NHS Ayrshire & Arran – What is Green Health?

Transcript:

Kirstin: 0:05
Hi and welcome to Make Space for Nature from NatureScot, the podcast that celebrates Scotland's nature, landscapes and species. I'm Kirstin Guthrie and in each episode I'll be joined by inspiring guests who share their expertise and passion for the natural world.

In this episode to mark Green Health Week, Fiona Leith and I chat to Wendy Ruiz de Pascal, Deputy Charge Nurse at Ailsa Hospital in Ayr. We also speak to Lindsay Twilley, Senior Project Officer for The Conservation Volunteers, Elaine Caldow, Public Health Programme Lead at NHS Ayrshire and Arran, and Helen Gemmell, Assistant Director of Estates and Support Services. They walk us through the green health work that happens in the local NHS area, including green space for health sessions, green gyms, nature-based walks and a garden area being developed in the chemotherapy unit grounds.

Kirstin: 0:48
First up, we're heading out to a meadow in the grounds to meet Elaine and Helen. So I'm here with Elaine Caldow, Public Health Programme Lead at NHS Ayrshire and Arran, and Helen Gemmell, Assistant Director of Estates and Support Services.

So hi, Elaine, welcome to the podcast thank you for joining us today. Could you give us a brief history of the approach to NHS greenspace that's been taken here in Ayrshire and why this particular hospital is something of a champion of it?

Elaine: 1:15
Well, we'd need to go back, I think, more than 10 years, and it goes back to, I think, 2011, when we had a report around the state of the NHS estate in Scotland and it kind of highlighted that we weren't doing enough with our outdoor estate and there was huge opportunity to improve the infrastructure and enhance the estate for health and well-being, but also to support biodiversity and the natural environment. So that was our opportunity thto do something about it and we started off by reviewing our whole estate in Ayrshire and Arran. So I think we had something like 86 sites, believe it or not, which included big hospital sites and small clinics, and there were seven in particular that were highlighted as we could do more with this. This is an opportunity to improve health and well-being and to look at our natural environment. This is an opportunity to improve health and well-being and to look at our natural environment, but this site in particular was key and it's clear why it's such an extensive site. It's something like 50 hectares, 12 of which were woodland. It's home to one of our main hospitals. It was historically a mental health facility on site. It goes back to the 1800s, I think, in terms of a site.

So it provided lots of opportunity for us to learn and to explore how we could open up the space for health and wellbeing and I think the feedback we were getting was that some people didn't even know that it was part of the NHS estate. So it was a great opportunity, I think, and we were very fortunate at that time because the Green Exercise Partnership had formed in Scotland and that was a partnership between NatureScot, Scottish Forestry, Public Health Scotland and Scottish Government were putting some money in at the time and we got the opportunity to become one of the demonstration sites for Scotland. So that opened up many doors, including some funding and expertise. So we were able to partner up with the environment sector. We got the expertise of a landscape architect, Mike Hyatt, who was fantastic because he opened up our eyes to the concept of master planning the outdoor estate and how naturally we might want to weave pathways through, manage the woodland, open up the space and through a lot of kind of engagement work with patients and staff, we came up with the plan for the site and then were able to charge on and really open it up.

So it went from what was a well-established woodland, lots of meadow grassland space but not accessible and we did so much work around that - we planted over 3000 trees, native trees, managed the woodland, opened up paths for walking but also a dual use walking and cycle path with some Sustrans funding and really created spaces that can be used for walking, for just being and enjoying, particularly on days like today.

And you know we've got a teaching space as well, which is a kind of woodhenge up in the clearing where you know people can come together for meetings and take time, to spend time from the viewpoint just looking over the estate. So it's been, there's been a lot of learning and I think it's been quite transformative really for this site and it kind of led us on, I suppose, to thinking what else can we do next? So we actually then went on to one of our other sites in North Ayrshire, at our Ayrshire Central Hospital site and got some funding in ourselves from Woodlands In and Around Towns funding at the time to open up a woodland path through that site and manage the woodland there and that connects a community of Castle Park up to the National Cycle Network there. So we took all the learning from this site, which was quite unique, and started applying it to some of our other sites. So it's taught us a lot and I think it's a really valued space. Now it's really fabulous. No better than a day when it's sunny.

Kirstin: 5:19
I know and we are actually sitting out in the sun. It's absolutely stunning and right at the top of a hill and we look down over the hospital and the grounds are so vast and lovely and you know there are some people walking about and you know how do people use this this, the NHS greenspaces to improve their health and well-being. Is it predominantly patients or visitors, or is it the general public as well?

Elaine: 5:41
It's a mix of everyone. So I think, as you can imagine, we were so focused on the infrastructure and, you know, opening up the space. So after that we did a lot of promotional work and actually installed interpretation boards that you'll see throughout the site that show the maps for where the walks are and how accessible they are and where they take you. So we did lots of work to promote the use of the site. So now you'll see that it's very much used by staff. So staff use the space all the time, time away from you know busy, stressful environments, particularly in the main general hospital area. They'll use time just to go for a walk with colleagues or on their own, just to sit and have lunch time away from their busy working lives. But you also will see people coming in from neighbouring communities. So dog walkers will come in. You'll see groups of people coming through, you know as part of maybe walking groups or groups of friends just that come through to use the site because they're now aware that it's a resource that they can use.

But I think we were also keen quite early on after that, to think about how we could support and encourage people who were maybe a bit more reluctant or required a bit of support to use the space, to use it.

So that's when we partnered up with the conservation volunteers and you'll have met Lindsay and they have been great because they bring their own skills, knowledge, enthusiasm to the site and it gives us again a different partner who have different skills from us.

So they have over the years run a number of different groups, some which they call green gyms but are very much focused around tailored experiences I suppose as to what people want to do in the outdoor space. So that might be a bit of practical conservation work on the site or maybe focused on the garden centre which we have on site, which was part of the original mental health facility there. So they've worked with us over the years and it helps us to think about how we support people, perhaps as part of the rehab and we've had people coming through as part of pulmonary rehab or cardiac rehab, but also just people who feel I would like to be part of that, but I need a bit of support and the support of a group and maybe a leader for the group to help me to do that. So it's a combination of all of those users, I think, that participate and use the site, I think in different ways.

Kirstin: 8:06
Yeah, we did actually talk about green gyms, because I wasn't even 100% sure what that term meant. So she kindly explained it really clearly and it's fascinating, and sometimes people do just need that support and encouragement to come out and the confidence to be using green spaces. So that's fantastic that you're almost filling that gap there. So thank you so much for joining us and I'm just going to hand over to Fiona now.

Fiona: 8:30
Thanks, Kirstin, and we're joined by Helen, the Assistant Director of Estates and Support Services, here. Helen, it's lovely to meet you and to be high on the hill on this sunny day. Is this a part of the grounds that you use yourself?

Helen: 8:44
Absolutely so I use these grounds when I'm working in this site, so I try to come out for a walk at lunchtime and the area we're sitting in is part of the walking route that I do, you know, once or twice a week and definitely in the summer. Maybe not so much in the winter, but I also am a cyclist and cycle to work, not so much recently, but in the summer I cycle to work almost every day, when I'm am a cyclist and cycle to work, not so much recently, but in the summer. I cycle to work almost every day when I'm working on this site and I use some of the route to cycle in as well. So I'd say I make a lot of use of this and a lot of my team also use this.

So they'll maybe have their lunch and then they'll go for a walk, but they'll also take a longer route between doing meetings and maybe benefit from that downtime coming back from one hospital area to the other hospital area, and they'll use the longer route to walk between the two buildings, which is really valuable because you feel you've not been, you've not really been skiving, because you've been just going the route, but you've actually taken the longer route, so I just think it's a fantastic area to use. My teams are the grounds team, are part of the services that I'm responsible for and they are so proud of what we've delivered on this site, very much working in conjunction with Elaine and her team to agree all the plans that we had and how we managed them, so they're fully involved in all this as well yeah.

Fiona: 10:06
I'm not surprised people lengthen their routes and their lunch hours here, it's glorious and not surprised either that there's a lot of pride about what is here. Can you, maybe because you've been here quite some time, you've said and maybe talk us through, what might have changed in terms of the management of the green spaces in your time and how you see them directly tackling climate change issues and sustainability?

Helen: 10:31
Yeah, Elaine mentioned that she was very much the driver for the change and the demonstration project on this site and I think traditionally a lot of management were reluctant to bring more people onto our site. They felt that the site was delivering what we should be doing for patients and if we bring more people onto the site there's additional risk. So we had queries like how will we know who's on our site? What will happen if they fall in the path? What if they bring dogs in and they foul the paths, and then who's going to clean it up and who's. So it was kind of looked at from the negative side of it and I think in the early days it took quite a lot of bringing that mindset around to the much more positive challenges about. Look at the opportunity this gives for staff. If people are feeling they've had a challenging meeting or they've had a challenging time with a patient or a family, it gives them that release to come out and even do a very short 10-minute walk because there's so many opportunities. So I think over the years that I've also been involved in this in my current role and also in my previous role, there has been a change in people's thoughts and their hearts and minds and the longer it's been here, the more value people have seen in it as well. We've also had some of the kind of more traditional managers or direct assistant directors. They've left now and you've got people who've got a different perspective, who've got a much more active outdoor life as well. So that has been really, really helpful and has really supported all the projects that are ongoing.

You know, one of the projects we've got at the moment is the Kyle chemotherapy garden and it actually wasn't even that long ago that we've pushed forward, but there was quite a lot of reluctance with that. We have to remember we're a hospital site. The chemotherapy service is a service with vulnerable patients who may be open to infection. There's lots of things that we do in the built environment that could cause infection and one of them is disturbing soil and rotting vegetation, which creates moulds. So I think people were really worried that as we developed the garden, we would actually infect all our patients. So we had to work with their colleagues to make sure that people fully understood what we'd be doing. Everything was risk assessed, and you know we've now got the garden coming along. It's getting a shape to it. Lots of the work's been done. There's still a lot. It's not a fully developed garden yet, but it's been absolutely fabulous for the staff of that area and the staff that have been involved in it.

And another really positive thing that I've seen about out of this is we're also it's part of community wealth building because we've actually got one of the criminal justice teams. So we are supporting people to be rehabilitated, and they I think the people that are on that team are very proud of the work that they've done. So that's been another benefit. And it's kind of opened our eyes as well, because in all the development that we had when we were trying to design and work out how we would manage this, we then got in touch with other third sector organisations, with the Rotary Club, so it's given us lots of other opportunities as well. I think one of the big challenges we had was is these projects are always great when they start, but how do you maintain them going forwards and is that going to cost the board lots of money? Because we don't have the money to maintain paths [Editor's note: this should be 'woodland paths']. So we've just worked with that. As we've gone along, we've had some quite innovative solutions at times.So and we're still progressing them to make sure that we can keep them all open.

Fiona: 14:11
That's really exciting and it's nice to hear about how you know the, the people involved in all this work have been reactive and adapted and you're sort of speaking with that continuing mindset for the future. What do you see happening in the future? You know what are the short to sort of medium-term plans for this space and how they contribute to the ongoing health care here?

Helen: 14:33
So we absolutely want to keep this space that's open and available to the local public. I myself bring my dog here sometimes. But I think we need to continue to develop, to look how we can weave this into some of our services and extend what we've got at the moment. I think the site this site as it is we will continue to develop and make minor changes and we would love this, you know continue to be maintained so that it does have all that open access. I think the Ayrshire Central site as well. That's a much newer site, so we've got more development there. There's also a big housing development being built on land on the Ayrshire Central site, so we absolutely want to link in with the local authority to make sure that we get the benefits from our greenspace for the local authority residents as well. So it's continually adapting. It's just a shame that we don't have all this green space on all of our sites.

Fiona: 15:29
Absolutely. Yeah, you'll be the envy of others when they hear about this, but the public are more generally becoming aware of the importance of conservation and biodiversity and it's clear that the organisation is here. How do you feel this contributes to people's understanding of that when they're in these spaces, and how might that change in the future?

Helen: 15:51
So we've all as a board have to report our greenhouse emissions. So I think it certainly raises the profile because we're accounting for some of the emissions by the green space we've got. So that's included in our reporting. And we do have a very proactive sustainability agenda as well. So through the work that's been done here, we're constantly promoting that work so that people do become aware, because it's clear that not everybody fully understands the sustainability agenda and the responsibilities we have to our local areas as well as to the wider carbon challenges that we've got. So this, this space, absolutely contributes to that.

Fiona: 16:33
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us on this beautiful day and taking your time out of your working day to speak to us. Thank you, thank you very much.

Fiona: 16:40 
We've walked through the hospital grounds this morning to meet Wendy Ruiz de Pascal, Deputy Charge Nurse on the Kyle Chemotherapy Unit here at the Ailsa hospital, and we're going to hear what green health means for those working and those receiving treatment in the hospital.

Hello, Wendy, welcome to the podcast and thank you for taking time out of a busy day to speak to us. We've been soaking up the beautiful green spaces here this morning. Can you tell me about what's been happening at the chemotherapy unit and where the ideas came from to develop it into a garden space?

Wendy: 17:20
We were based up at the Ayr Hospital and then, because of Covid and the type of patients that we treat, they thought it was more safer for us to move out the main hospital and there was an empty building down within the Ailsa Hospital.

So we moved down here and a lot of the staff at the time, you know it was a big thing, you know the move. We had a ward and we had to give that up and we're now just treating day patients. But I think for us as a team, you know, being able to look out onto a green space was a big thing for us and also for the patients coming in. They felt more safe and they could drive up to the door and it's all in the one level and we were lucky enough that we look out onto a lovely enclosed garden that's south facing and that's the dream, and it just wasn't utilised and there was nothing in it really, apart from a lovely tree which I think is a yew tree, but apart from that it was just grass and nothing to encourage like patients to come out on. Or you know, look at. And there was certainly wildlife, squirrels and rabbits and deer, but I just wanted to bring it a bit more into the garden. It was obviously in the woodlands along the side of the unit but nothing was really coming into the garden and I just thought that would benefit the patients. And talking to the patients and engaging with the patients, they also thought the same thing.

Fiona: 18:53
And how long a process has that been? Has this been years in the making? Obviously, we're looking out on the garden just now and see that there's still work being done to develop it.

Wendy: 19:03
It wasn't really. It was maybe last year. I approached hospital staff, but obviously the funding just wasn't there. And then a patient actually said you know why don't you email? Gave me a couple of emails from people that do deal with the health services Eileen McCutcheon and they just it just seemed to blossom from there. Um, it grew arms and legs, and now I'm getting a garden that's been designed.

Fiona: 19:34
Fantastic and we're sort of focused in on this garden here ahead of Green Health Week and you know the experience people can have that's beneficial to their health when they're in green spaces. Could you maybe just describe a bit of what's here for listeners in the garden and what's to come?

Wendy: 19:53
So there was an existing seating area but all the seats, the wood's kind of rotten and there were some planters and they were just like dead plants in them. Obviously the building hadn't been used so they hadn't been taken care of. There was a couple of existing paths and a tree, as I said, in the middle, and the gardeners just come and cut the grass and that was basically it. We did put some like wee patio chairs up near the waiting area and we got some artwork that goes on the walls and a mirror and you know, we put some plants in the summer to try and encourage people to come out. You know brighten it a wee bit.

Fiona: 20:31
Yeah, and you know it's about. You know, the experience of looking at nature, yes, being in nature and experiencing nature firsthand in quite a sort of physical, sensory way. A garden yes. What do you think the patients quite directly benefit in that in terms of health care? How do they benefit?

Wendy: 20:54
Well, I think, having something nice to look. You know they're sitting for hours in treatment areas that are looking, overlooking the garden, and they love to see the squirrels or the rabbits or the birds, but nothing was really coming into the garden because there's no plants in the garden. So I just kind of thought, if we got that it would be a more joy to look at the garden. And we've certainly got binoculars, you know that they can have a look into the, you know, into the woods, because there's deer, there's a buzzard, you know, and some of the staff are interested in that. So you know they are quite keen to look at it and say, oh, there's such and such. So then the patients come to the window.

Fiona: 21:30
Conversation topic yeah.

Wendy: 21:35
Yeah so, and then I just, you know, I thought you need something to try and encourage people to come out, you know

Fioa: 21:41 yeah, so it's as much a mental health support during treatment than anything maybe directly physical that, that they would benefit from the garden, although just being in nature can have a calming physical effect.

Wendy: 21:53
Yes, and that's what they do say that there is a calm about the place. I mean, it's a very busy unit and we're open Monday to Friday.There's clinics going on, but every patient that comes in says there's always a calm about it and a friendly atmosphere, relaxed atmosphere you know.
Fiona: 22:13: and is it maybe quite a solitary space for patients to come to, or is it a place of social connection outdoors?

Wendy: 22:18
I think maybe solitary as well. There is patients that their loved ones have passed away and they've kindly donated benches, picnic tables, and I think it would be nice for them to be able to come back and see them being used and, you know, even to sit and think about. You know their loved ones attended here, you know.

Fiona: 22:40
So the garden's a place of calm, but also a place of hope for people and reflection. And yeah, that's lovely. Thank you so much, Wendy.

Fiona: 22:53: 
We're now standing in the wonderful woodland at the hospital and we're joined by Lindsay Twilley, Senior Project Officer for The Conservation Volunteers, more often known as TCV.

Lindsay, it's lovely to meet you today. Can you tell us a little bit about where we're standing right now?

Lindsay: 23:06
Thank you. It's lovely to be here today. We are standing in the woodland just adjacent to Ayr hospital in South Ayrshire and the woodland is coming to a hospital in South Asia, and the woodland is coming alive adjacent to us as well. We've got the acorn mind and body garden and a lovely greenhouse, and within the woodland there are lovely paths for the public to use, patients and visitors, so it's a really lovely green space for everyone.

Fiona: 23:29
What sort of activities, both natural and human, are taking place this sort of season, spring season?

Lindsay: 23:37
At the moment, we have got spring coming to life, where we have everything coming. There's greenery everywhere, below our feet, in the air. We see the trees coming to life, there's foliage and leaves. The birds are coming to life, where they're meeting, meeting up, they're joining up, they're looking for nesting opportunities in the background. There I don't know if you can hear it we've actually got a really big rookery, so that that's very active at the moment. We've got fungi behind you, so there's so much coming to life. It's amazing. It's a buzz of activity, and we've got some staff that have just walked past us as well on the well-used pathways through the woodlands, and that's what we like to see. We like people being outside in the green spaces and using it and feeling the benefits of it.

Kirstin: 24:22
That's great, and it's such an amazing space, and actually trying to describe it is really hard because it's such a sunny day today, so we've been very lucky with the weather. We can smell the wild garlic erupting and obviously we can hear the birds and the butterflies are all out, so it's a really, really lovely environment, and so can you just tell us a bit about TCV and and how it came? You know, how are you, how come you're working with the hospital, and what expertise and knowledge can a volunteering group like yours bring to green health projects?

Lindsay:24:50
So TCV has been working with the NHS for a number of years. What we bring as an environmental charity is our ethos is to bring and connect people to green spaces and what we try and do is we link people to these green spaces to improve their mental and physical health. But the aim is, as an environmental charity, is to promote the green space to get better, but also to help the biodiversity, help nature to flourish so that it supports us and we support it. So we do that through a number of projects and our current project at the moment is Green Space for Health and what we believe is that if you take people outside, you can actually get them to feel better about it being there within a group setting, but also they can come out by themselves and you give them a bit of confidence, you give them a bit of skills, you give them a bit of knowledge and from that experience and they can take it forward and hopefully get the benefits at any time of the year on their own.

Kirstin: 25:51
Great and who actually attends these walks and other sessions. Is it patients? Is it the public? You know who actually comes along?

Lindsay:25:58
So we have a combination of groups that attend our sessions. So we do get referrals from NHS staff. We get people just coming along who have seen our posters and our social media posts. We get it through word of mouth. That is one of our biggest things. People come to our group, they experience it. Then they say to their friend oh, I went to this and it was great. And then someone else joins and that's usually our biggest way of getting people to come along. So it's a variety. We also sometimes get community groups themselves that come across and within my role, we actually work with wards, with the patients within the ward as well, so that's considered like a closed group. So there's a whole variety of people that we kind of work with and try and get to benefit from our projects.

Kirstin: 26:45
Great and you know you talk about the projects. What kind of projects? There's health walks and I believe there's green gyms, but can you explain even what a green gym is?

Lindsay:26:54
Yes. So this one, this is a one that kind of confuses people a wee bit because immediately in their heads they're thinking, oh, I'm getting them on a treadmill outside or we've got heavy weights. But the concept is just to get active and moving in a green space. And the green gym is a TCV trademark and what it is is we split up our sessions to have a warm-up. So that is some kind of concept where we look at the tasks or the activities we're going to get involved in, get warmed up, prepared for what we're going to get doing. We then do some of the activity, take a rest, do more of an activity and then at the end we kind of summarise it, cool down, that cooling down. So that's kind of the ethos behind Green Gym. Our health walks a lot of people say, well, I can just go for a walk, that's great, that's what we want people to do. But within our health walks we're observing nature. We go on butterfly hunts. My best memory is seeing people of a certain age running around with butterfly nets, looking, and you know they say to me I feel five years old again, that that in the spirit of being a child again, that joy comes back to me and that's the whole ethos behind it taking people and saying look, it's simplistic things. You can do this with your grandchildren, you can do it on your own, you could possibly do it with technology, apps and all of that type of thing. Just get out there. And that's what we want people to do is we want to impart a bit of knowledge, a bit of confidence. We really want to say to people you can do it, get out there and benefit.

Kirstin: 28:17
That is so important. And sometimes people do prefer to do it as part of a group or part of an organised activity. Maybe they just feel safer, more secure. But yeah, no, that's great. It's just instilling that confidence into people, and you know what kind of feedback do you get from people when they come along to your sessions?

Lindsay:28:32
So it's quite interesting. So if we look at our health walks, I have people that generally don't see anybody over the weekend. They're quite socially isolated. And they say to me in one of my groups on a Monday and they all say to me that sets me up for the week, I have purpose, it gives me structure, it gets me out, I get to talk to people and then actually the rest of my week goes really well because I've got something to look forward to. And that's kind of a quote that really sings well with me, that that you're benefiting people in some way, because then they feel more purpose and then they want to do a lot more in life. So that's with the health walks.

But I had a really great experience with someone who came along to a closed group workshop and we introduced them to something called citizen science, obviously getting everybody to kind of contribute to wildlife recordings. And this person kind of said to me afterwards in a bit of feedback he was saying I came to your group and I wasn't sure it was really for me. I'm not too sure. And he said I took my daughter's car for a service and he said the previous week we had been out looking at grasslands and we were looking at wax caps and the fungi and the grass and they couldn't believe it was all just there. They'd never seen it before. He says I ended up going on my hands and knees looking at all this fungus and recording it on an app. He says I never would have. I would have just sat there bored, waiting on the car to be serviced. And yet he and then he went home and told his wife about it and I think the wife must have been like what is going on here? But that's what I love to hear. I love that you've kind of instilled something and then you've opened the world, their eyes to nature and things like that. So, yeah, those are the wee things that really sing and 
we do health evaluations, where we do it at the beginning to get a baseline for projects. We do it during the sessions, you know, six months in a year in to see if people are benefiting from it. We do impact surveys as well to see are we just making it up that people are benefiting, but are they really getting something? Because obviously these projects are funded. So we need justification and evidence. And just from the quotes, that makes me happy, but actually when you get a little bit more data, it proves a lot more. So that's why we're kind of embedded within the public health sector, because we're trying to do a preventative measure, we're trying to get people to be healthier.

Kirstin: 30:43
Yeah, so yeah, that's yeah and I think a lot of people are probably more aware nowadays of the kind of positive benefits of being out in nature and, as you say, it's the kind of mental health benefits for people who are perhaps don't see many people during the weekend, but also sometimes people are put off, I think, by the term citizen science and it is just a case of recording what you see and you know we walked along here and we saw some amazing fungi and you know, perhaps I wouldn't have recognised that myself if I hadn't actually known what it was. So it's just trying to notice what's around, isn't it a lot of the time? And what about the challenges or barriers to this work? You know how would you like to see these types of initiatives develop across Scotland?

Lindsay:31:23
So within these projects we are funded for limited time and funding is always a challenge when you go for these projects. Sometimes they could be six months funding, a year's funding, and you're just getting started and then it ends and we would ideally like a bit of sustainability. But obviously within our economic financial climate it's not always the easiest thing to achieve, but we do our best in what we can do. Other limitations are when we talk about economic situations, financial people find it difficult to get to site. So within this project we've actually put in transport methods so we can collect people, bring them in sight, because this location is a little bit outside the city center, so we realize that can be a barrier. Although there is public transport, it's not as frequent as we would like it, so that can be a barrier to things.

In our projects we are trying to reach a really big audience. Different ages, different backgrounds and sometimes even language can be a challenge and it and that's all. What we do is always trying to get feedback from people and we're trying to instill new strategies and new ways to kind of meet the needs of groups. Within my walks I've got people that have visual impairments. So how do we, how do we tackle that? So we put into place strategies to make sure that we're reaching more people and more people feel comfortable to join the group and stay in the group. I think those are the challenges that we kind of. We're always going to have challenges, but we just need to look at options to kind of get over those barriers to attending.

Kirstin: 32:50
So, yeah, I think that's. Yeah, that's what I was thinking that you're almost any barrier, that you're kind of just positively trying to break them down all the time, which is great, because it's always an ever-evolving problem and issues with barriers, but that's great.

So thank you so much for joining us today. It's been lovely to meet you and I definitely would encourage anybody in the local area or from further afield to come and visit the lovely woodlands here. Thank you,

Lindsay: 33:13
Thank you very much for your time.

Kirstin: 33:16
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