GM Walking Festival helps health services build walking into everyday care

It is widely recognised the impact that regular walking can have on people’s health and wellbeing. There is strong evidence showing how it can support with the management of things like stress and anxiety and the role it can play in improving sleep. Alongside this, walking is also a tool to support better communication, having conversations side by side, out in nature can encourage greater openness.

Therefore, at GM Moving we are trying to better understand how the healthcare system can embed movement into their daily practices to support the health and wellbeing of staff and patients.

Work is happening right across Greater Manchester to utilise the positive impact walking can have for our communities. Places like Urban Village Medical Centre have been using walking to bring patients and healthcare providers together to support health and wellbeing and to encourage better connectivity across between services and patients.

During the 2025 GM Walking Festival, Urban Village put on a series of walks demonstrating how walking can bring together communities and local services to improve access to health support. One of their walks featured a focus on mental health and wellbeing. Led by the practice’s health coach, the walk for patients of the practice followed a route along the canal and local parks.

Beyond being a way to get people moving, the walk created space for conversations about mental health. Attendance of staff from the Manchester Talking Therapies team provided people with information about available services, how to access them, and resources to support wellbeing at home.

In this case, walking acted as a bridge, connecting people with local services they might not otherwise known existed.

Stories like this show how walking can be an accessible way to introduce movement into healthcare settings. By moving a session that previously would have been held indoors from chairs to outdoors and walking or wheeling we can begin to embed movement into our everyday.

For more information about how health care organisations are embedding walking into their services read our mental health and movement case study here.

If you work in healthcare, the GM Walking Festival 2026 could be your opportunity to step outside the consulting room and make movement part of how you deliver care. Find out how to get involved here.