The benefits that contact with the natural environment can have for an individual’s health and wellbeing are increasingly accepted throughout the health and environmental sector but there is still a need to ensure that the evidence for the benefits claimed is robust and can stand up to scrutiny Walking the Way to Health (WHI), an initiative of Natural England and the British Heart Foundation is taking action to ensure that the evidence collected is consistent nationally through the introduction of the Outdoor Health Questionnaire.
WHI aims to get more people out walking in their own communities. It targets those who take little exercise or who live in areas with a prevalence of poor health indicators. Since 2000 it is estimated that WHI has encouraged over a million people to walk more. It has helped to create over 525 local health walk schemes and has trained over 31,500 volunteer walk leaders.
Since WHI began, local schemes have collected data on participants and kept registers of attendance. Most schemes have recorded this information in local databases and used it to evaluate their work and to show funding bodies how they are meeting targets for encouraging physical activity.
The Outdoor Health Questionnaire, which would normally be completed before an individual started their first walk, is a simple 2-sided form. It gathers health screening information on the individual to ensure they are suitable to undertake the health walk, together with data collection questions, to allow us to gain a local and national picture of who is taking part in health walks with walkers being asked for their postcode, age range, gender, ethnic background and particular health conditions.
A crucial supplementary question and one supported by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) asks people how physically active they are at the point of joining a health walk. If asked again periodically this question can establish how physical activity levels have changed.
The questionnaire is not walking specific and so is capable of being used to evaluate other exercise based health intervention and it is hoped that over time the questions or derivatives of these will be used by other Green Exercise projects.
WHI has been working with partners—notably the British Heart Foundation, Sport England and BTCV—in consultation with NICE to develop this new evaluation system. The process will be fully compliant with the Data Protection Act and the data will not be traceable to individuals. The information gathered will be used by local schemes as well as by Natural England and its partners nationally.
A database to enable the storage of very large amounts of data on participants of healthy walking and green exercise collected by the questionnaire is currently being developed in conjunction with BTCV. Undergoing final testing at the moment it will be ready to launch in the early summer. The data collected will meet the high standards set by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and will provide a foundation for further research in the field.