Therapeutic Horticulture: Using Horticulture as a Medical Treatment – 2013

Richard G. Brown

With Community of Hearts, Guelph Enabling Garden, Ontario

The Riverwood Conservancy, Mississauga, Ontario

The Horizon Centre Garden, Fieldhead Hospital, Wakefield, West Yorkshire

enabling

memory mobility

confidence

self-esteem rehabilitation

peace recovery

collaborate socialise

ownership

Personal email: brown9952173@hotmail.co.uk Work email: richard.brown@swyt.nhs.uk WCMT Travel Blog: www.thetravellinght.wordpress.com Website: www.thehorticulturaltherapist.wordpress.com Twitter: @RichardBrownHT

I work as a Horticultural Therapist for South West Yorkshire NHS Foundation Trust (SWYT) in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. The Trust serves an area which consists of over 1 million people. I work at the Horizon Centre, a specialist assessment and treatment centre for adults with learning disabilities. Working within a multi-disciplinary team I use horticulture to as means of assessing and improving people’s skills, abilities, social interactions, physical and mental health.

I applied for the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship after reading about it in our weekly NHS Trust e-newsletter. WCMT was being publicised because Dr. Richard Coaten, a dance therapist with SWYT, had previously been awarded a Fellowship to travel to Canada.

The UK has traditionally looked across to North America as the lead on evidence based practice of horticulture as a medical treatment. Therefore my Fellowship took me to Ontario, Canada, and Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota in the USA. I visited 31 gardens in four and a half weeks including the Chicago Botanic Garden, a world leader in the professional education and delivery of horticultural therapy; the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario, Canada, the Detroit Urban Farms and to the Michigan State University gardens. Michigan State was the first university in the world to offer a degree level qualification in horticultural therapy. My Fellowship also enabled me to attend the 40th annual American Horticultural Therapy Conference in Minneapolis in order to meet and learn from world leaders in the profession. Since my Fellowship, I have been working to improve my own practice and documentation in line with some of the best organisations in the world as well as raising the profile of the Horizon Centre as a multi-disciplinary specialist service.

I have also been working to increase the use of horticulture as a treatment across the South West Yorkshire NHS Trust. This has been achieved by creating a group of professionals, which meet bi-annually to discuss opportunities, share information about funding sources and offer horticultural training to staff. Our NHS Trust is now exploring the opportunity of offering NVQ qualifications in horticulture to staff who will use it to benefit the people they work with and support. Horticultural therapy practice has been in existence in the UK for a long time, with many of the old mental health institutions recognising the benefits of horticultural and land based activities for the patients they served. Only in recent years, with the support of Thrive and Trellis, the leading horticultural therapy organisations in the UK, has it begun to be seen and developed into an evidenced based practice and profession. The resulting report and recommendations from my Fellowship have contributed to this process, having been publicised by Thrive and an abridged version published in the journal Growth Point.

independence

wellbeing belonging

It has also been endorsed by the leading researcher into horticultural therapy in the UK and by Coventry University, who asked me to speak about the Fellowship on their horticultural therapy diploma course. I have been pleased by the response the Fellowship, travel blog and subsequent report have received across the world, leading to new contacts and connections. It has generated interest in Sweden, Denmark, Canada, the USA and Australia. The report has been used as evidence for a new health care facility in North Carolina to include a horticultural therapy unit, as well as being part of a submission for accreditation status by the Michigan Horticultural Therapy Association. A service in Ontario has used the report to demonstrate outcomes of using horticulture as a treatment. I have also been invited to attend and speak at a future conference of the Canadian Horticultural Therapy Association and to visit a new facility in Denmark. Lafayette Greens, Detroit, Michigan