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Welcome to the Outdoors and Health Network Web Space
The Outdoors and Health Network is a newly created collaborative network of researchers and public sector/policy representatives that have come together to examine the relationship between individuals’ health and well-being and their use of the outdoors. This project has been co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), under the Understanding Individual Behaviour Exploratory Networks (UIBEN) Programme. Over the next 12 months the network members will collaborate on a project called “Society’s relationship with the natural world and the role of the outdoors in health and well-being”.
There are currently nine academic institutions and eight other agencies that are members of the Outdoors and Health Network. UHI Millennium Institute is the lead research organisation for this project and is coordinating the network’s activities.
The project will consist of three main types of activity:
1. Networking events: to exchange knowledge, build a sharing culture within the network and plan coordination between the academics and network partners
2. Project development activities: to assess the current gaps within data and research on the links between outdoor use and health and test out new ways of inter-disciplinary working in this area
3. Proposal writing: networking events will focus on producing proposals for future research that will extend the ideas generated, and tested, through the project development activities
Although the ‘outdoors’ includes urban spaces such as the street and pedestrian precincts, this project focuses on the ‘natural’ in spaces where people can engage with nature (from private gardens to wilderness spaces). Previous research has investigated the relationship between health and use of the outdoors but this network provides a new opportunity to connect social scientists with biological and medical researchers. The different disciplines will work together to develop new, collaborative ways of working.
This web space is a place where network members can share ideas through personal blogs, debate and discuss issues through a web forum and share the knowledge and experiences of the project with a wider audience. Guests visiting the website can keep up to date with the network’s activities and events, download publications, read blogs and add comments. All the blogs and the events calendar have RSS feeds so you can easily keep up to date with what’s going on.
