Nominations are now invited for the 2024 NHS Forest awards. Any NHS Forest site is eligible to be nominated for an award. It is free to sign up to become an NHS Forest site – already nearly 400 sites are working to improve green spaces for staff, patients and their local community.
NHS Forest would like to hear about projects that involve:
• Innovative development of green space at health sites to enhance biodiversity
• Active community engagement
• Pioneering use of green space for health and wellbeing and the difference it has made to staff, patients or the community
• Collaborative green space projects that involve working across several departments, groups or organisations to develop green space.
Nominated projects can be collaborations, but it must be an NHS Forest site, Trust or Health Board leading the work.
Shortlisted entries will be contacted in August and asked to prepare a one-minute video, which could be a piece to camera or photos with voiceover. Support with this will be available. Nominations close on August 1, 2024 and the winners will be announced at the NHS Forest Conference in October.
NHS Forest Conference
For the first time, this will be a hybrid event, taking place online via Zoom and in person at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester. The theme of the 2024 conference is ‘Integrating trees and green space into the NHS’. The programme will explore how trees on healthcare sites are important for sustainability, clinical practice and community.
TV presenter Flo Headlam will be the Keynote speaker at this event. Flo spent more than 20 years working in the charity sector before beginning a journey into horticulture. She is a regular contributor to Gardeners’ World online magazine and is currently involved in several community gardening initiatives in the London area.
Chair for the event will be Professor Baroness Kathy Willis, a Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Biology and the Principal of St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford.
Places at the conference are free of charge, although in-person tickets are limited to just 50. Register to attend here.
