Valuing green infrastructure improvements at Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast, Northern Ireland

The complex interconnection between human and environmental health renders the addressing of environmental problems paramount to public health. As part of the Northern Ireland’s ‘Make Life Better’ public health strategy, the Belfast Health & Social Care Trust envisions the transformation of the Musgrave Park Hospital’s outdoor grounds to improve green infrastructure and the access to it, the main beneficiaries being the main users of its facilities, its staff, patients, and visitors.This study was commissioned to identify the preferences of the current and potential users of the outdoor grounds in terms of green infrastructure improvements that would address their heterogeneous needs.

Stated preference and revealed preference methods were employed to estimate the willingness to pay for different types of improvements and predict the corresponding increase in time spent outdoors along with the entailing welfare gains. The overarching aim is to provide the Estates Department with the monetary value of the intervention and inform them about the most economically optimal way to allocate its resources. Taking advantage of the fact that there are disparities in access to green infrastructure within the premises of the hospital, we are exploring in an experimental setting the effect of heterogeneity in the physical environment during the surveying procedure on preferences.