National WfH evaluation

This section is about the national evaluation of WfH.

The information on this page relates to the evaluations of WfH carried out nationally by Natural England. The Ramblers and Macmillan Cancer Support are committed to continuing to monitor and evaluate WfH in order to improve the effectiveness of walking and public health interventions and demonstrate their value to decision makers and funders.

Why evaluate WfH?

We believe the combination of nature, exercise and social interaction offered by WfH is good for people’s health. We want more walk schemes to be offered, and more people to take part. We want GPs to prescribe WfH to people attending their surgeries, and for WfH to continue for years to come.

To do all this we need funding and support, and to receive this we need to show that WfH works. In the same way that new medicines and treatments are tested to ensure they are effective and are worth the investment, we evaluate WfH so we can provide evidence of the impact it has had.

How has WfH been evaluated?

Natural England developed its evaluation for WfH in partnership with the Department of Health and NICE – the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence – who recommend that:

“Practitioners, policy makers and commissioners should only endorse...walking and cycling schemes to promote physical activity that are part of a properly designed and controlled research study to determine effectiveness.”

Much of the evaluation was underpinned by two important tools: the Outdoor Health Questionnaire (OHQ) and the WfH Database. The high number of walk schemes using these offers a very large sample of reliable data that is useful at national, regional and local level.

The evaluation concentrated on national scale evaluation that offers high quality, robust and credible research. This was achieved by:

• Commissioning research from organisations via a fair and competitive tender process to achieve the best results for nvestment.
• Supporting research by academic institutions.
• Conducting research internally.

Where this research involved walk schemes, the national centre worked with those who use the WfH database to record information about their walks and walkers, in order to use this extra data to add depth and value to the research.

What has been done and what has it told us?

Follow these links below for more information.