

In the high-technology industry, two-thirds of all workers believe they could find a better job in less than 60 days if they only took the time to look.Glassdoor, a company that allows employees to rate their employers, reports that only 54 percent of employees recommend their company as a place to work.Gallup’s 2014 research shows that only 13 percent of all employees are “highly engaged,” and 26 percent are “actively disengaged.” 2.1 These concerns are grounded in disconcerting data: 2 in the minds of business leaders, second only to the challenge of building global leadership.

Our research suggests that the issues of “retention and engagement” have risen to No. “It’s about making a positive choice in your life, rather than a punitive choice - like ‘You’re sick, take a pill.’ It just seems so much more supportive.Explore Workplace Culture with Deloitte CulturePath “With social media and Instagram, when you see your friends going out to beautiful places, you want to go too,” Sun says. Plus, these unusual prescriptions are the prettiest you’ll ever fill - a fact that Betty Sun, program manager at the Institute at the Golden Gate, which runs Park Rx, says encourages people to actually do them. A growing number of “ecotherapy” counselors conduct sessions outdoors to combine the benefits of therapy and nature. Even mental-health professionals are going green. Walk With a Doc, which sponsors free physician-led community walks, is now in 47 states, and Park Rx, which has studied and tracked park-prescription programs since 2013, says these are now in at least 33 states and Washington, D.C. The National Park Service’s Healthy Parks Healthy People program promotes parks as a “powerful health prevention strategy” locally and nationally. And in recent years, organizations with the goal of getting people outside for their health have proliferated in the U.S. In 2018, NHS Shetland, a government-run hospital system in Scotland, began allowing doctors at 10 medical practices to write nature prescriptions that promote outdoor activities as a routine part of patient care. “It’s something to look forward to and to try to feel successful about,” he says. The specificity that comes with framing these recommendations as prescriptions, Zarr says, motivates his patients to actually do them.

In 2017 he founded Park Rx America to make it easier for health professionals to write park prescriptions for people of all ages, particularly those with obesity, mental-health issues or chronic conditions like hypertension and Type 2 diabetes.īy writing nature prescriptions - alongside pharmaceutical prescriptions, when necessary - physicians are encouraging their patients to get outdoors and take advantage of what many view to be free medicine. “There’s a paradigm shift in the way we think about parks: not just as a place to recreate, but literally as a prescription, a place to improve your health,” says Zarr, who writes up to 10 park prescriptions per day. The scripts are recorded in his patients’ electronic health records. These “nature prescriptions” - therapies that are redeemable only outdoors, in the fresh air of a local park - advise patients to spend an hour each week playing tennis, for instance, or to explore all the soccer fields near their home. Robert Zarr, a pediatrician in Washington, D.C., are even writing prescriptions for it. The medical community is increasingly viewing green space as a place for their patients to reap physical and mental health benefits.
