Mind, Body and blood: advancing green care through innovative methodologies within the field of health geography

Geography and health disciplines have become inseparable, with our environments effecting our physical health and mental wellbeing, spawning the subdiscipline of Health Geographies. In this paper we argue that radical innovations are needed to fully understand how space and place affect our health, with cross-disciplinary work enabling a variety of new and innovative methodologies to advance our understanding of the world we live in. A variety of environmental activities, such as gardening and green exercise, are available to enable health promotion, whilst more strategic and structured opportunities through Green Care (GC) enable spaces such as care farms (CF) to flourish. We argue that these nature-based spaces will become invaluable post-Coronavirus and there is a need to upscale activity, with a mental health epidemic exacerbating issues experienced within the National Health Service (NHS). While arguing that Social Prescribing provides a vital resource to enable some pressure to be diverted to community and voluntary sectors. We suggest that geographers identify the far-reaching ability of this discipline, whilst engaging, innovating, and driving it forward. This demonstrates growth in the geo-health field and an appetite for geographers to adopt creative methodologies to explore the topic; an area which has evidently grown more given the pandemic. We advocate the collaboration between disciplines, sharing knowledge and techniques, and allowing mixed methods to advance understanding of phenomena. A practical and pragmatic example study is given in this paper, located within the United Kingdom (UK) to evidence an opportunity for innovation and development