Addressing the Mental Health of Health

How do we take what we learn and integrate nature into health care centers, workplaces, and school yards to increase equitable nature exposure?

Addressing the Mental Health of Health Practitioners

A proposed CHN study at Houston Methodist might be just what the doctor ordered for health care workers who are feeling the pressures of the job.

Omar Elsayed, MD, a Houston Methodist postdoctoral fellow in the CHN, has created the Nature Pill, a clinical trial that would test the cortisol levels of ICU nurses and physicians to learn whether a dose of nature is beneficial to mental and physical health.

The randomized, controlled clinical trial would put 28 health care providers, 14 men and 14 women, into an intervention or control group. Those is the control group would spend their weekend in typical fashion, doing the things they normally do. The intervention group would spend the weekend at a house on Galveston Bay, walking on the beach, maybe visiting a rookery and enjoying their free time in whatever manner they choose.

At various points, the cortisol levels of the participants would be tested, before the weekend begins, immediately after, and then four weeks post. The team hypothesizes that spending time in nature will decrease the susceptibility to burn out or decrease the burnout.

Previous studies into this area were observational, so this would be a first-ofits-kind pilot study, pending IRB approval.