The National Green Health Partnership monitoring Framework Years 1 to 3 report shows how the Green Health Partnership model can be considered effective at facilitating green health opportunities, awareness, and capacity-building activities across sectors.

It demonstrates how better cross-sectoral coordination can mainstream approaches to improving health through engagement with the natural environment. It also shows the breadth of Green Health Partnership activity and the extent to which they collectively achieved their five key aims during the first three years of operation:

• An increase in the number of people having contact with nature.
• Greater awareness in health professionals of the contribution of nature-based health promotion and interventions to physical and mental health and well-being.
• Public Health and Health & Social Care sectors routinely embracing nature-based health promotion and interventions for prevention, treatment and care.
• Greater public awareness of the benefits & opportunities for contact with nature as part of everyday life.
• Nature-based contributions to health mainstreamed and funded sustainably

The Lanarkshire Green Health Partnership became embedded in the area health board during Year 3 and the other three Green Health Partnerships were re-funded for a further two years via a consortium led by NatureScot.

It is hoped that at the end of five years of support, all four Green Health Partnerships will have become mainstreamed within public health policy and practice. This aim was boosted by the publication in 2022 of the NHS Scotland Climate Emergency and Sustainability Strategy 2022-26 that includes the proposed action to: establish and embed Green Health Partnerships and similar approaches to increasing the use of nature-based solutions to deliver health outcomes as part of the strategy for Sustainable Care.

Read some examples of Green Health case studies