Study title

United Kingdom

Individual

Organization

Event/process

Group

Following a literature review to identify appropriate interventions, we held a stakeholder event attended by 30 people who, either professionally or as volunteers, were involved in the design, upkeep and use of local green spaces. This produced a list of 35 possible interventions, supplementing those identified through the literature review with a further six drawn from practice-based knowledge. We then emailed the list of interventions to members of eight different stakeholder groups asking them to identify their top five preferences. Our sampling approach was purposive: groups were selected because of their local or professional knowledge across open space design, healthcare, and community development. The aim was to generate a broad initial understanding of practitioners’ views of ‘what works’. A total of 92 people responded to this exercise. The groups surveyed were: public health experts, volunteer members of Sheffield Green Spaces Forum, parks and Countryside Department staff, planning Department staff, experts from the National Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine, attendees of a ‘natural health’ event organised by Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust, community workers involved in Sheffield’s People Keeping Well partnerships and members of the Royal Town Planning Institute’s regional branch.The fourth stage was to discuss why the preferred interventions had been chosen, how they would work in practice, and what factors would influence decisions on whether or not to fund such interventions. To do this we arranged six focus group discussions involving a total of 28 participants, using a similar purposive approach. They were: public health experts, Sheffield Green spaces forum, community workers from People Keeping Well, parks and countryside staff, planning staff and a group of national clinical experts, facilitated by the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare. The aim of these discussions was to generate information not only on what was perceived to work, but how and why participants thought their preferred interventions would work. The focus group discussions were supplemented by six one-to-one semi-structured interviews arranged in order to address gaps in the perspectives offered through the group discussions. These were held with two primary care medical practitioners; two therapists; an academic specialising in physical exercise; and a housing developer. The focus groups and interviews all addressed three themes: how the proposed interventions would contribute to wellbeing; what decision-making processes would facilitate or prevent interventions being implemented; and the reasons why proposed interventions might be approved or rejected.