Nature as Medicine
Practitioner Certification
Certification for licensed healthcare providers. Two credentials. 86 CME credits.
Connection and partnership with nature heal us in ways that are broad and deep, across physical, emotional, mental health, and cognitive domains, and healthcare is now poised to recognize it. This program trains licensed healthcare providers to guide forest bathing and to build a working plan for bringing Nature as Medicine into their own lives and clinical practice.
In-Person First + Online
$4,700
USD
INCLUDES
- Three-day nature immersion
- Six months of bimonthly ninety-minute live calls with expert guides and trainers
- One-to-one mentorship toward a documented plan for your own practice
- Certification as a Forest Therapy Guide
- Certification as a Nature as Medicine Practitioner, 86 hours of AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™, with equivalent credit designated for nursing, psychology, physician assistants, and social work
EXCLUDES
- Travel to and from the immersion venue
Who it's for
This program is open to any licensed healthcare practitioner who wants to be on the leading edge of establishing Nature as Medicine.
It is especially for providers who want:
– to bring nature into clinical practice with rigor rather than improvisation
– to read the evidence base for their own specialty and speak to it clearly
– certification as a Forest Therapy guide alongside clinical credentials
– CME or equivalent credit for the learning they’re already drawn to do
– colleagues across medicine, nursing, psychology, social work, and allied fields who are doing the same work
Physicians, nurse practitioners, psychiatrists, PAs, psychologists, nurses, and social workers have all come through recent cohorts.
What you'll experience
The program opens with a three-day nature immersion and continues online for six months.
You will:
– Step out of the clinical environment and into the practice itself through a three-day nature immersion.
– Experience forest bathing from the inside, not only as a method to learn, but as a relational practice you can bring into your work with patients.
– Practise guiding the Standard Sequence and begin shaping invitations around the needs of the people you serve.
– Develop your ability to hold space without directing the outcome, allowing participants to arrive at their own insights and responses.
– Explore the relationship between scientific evidence, lived experience and the way nature-based practice can sit alongside healthcare.
– Learn alongside other healthcare professionals who are asking similar questions about how this work can become part of their practice.
– Begin translating the training into your own professional context, with mentoring to help you define how Nature as Medicine could work across your care setting.
What makes this different
This program was designed inside healthcare rather than adapted for it. It is offered jointly by the Nature and Systems Institute and the Academies of Nature and Forest Therapies, and the continuing education activity has been planned and implemented with Mass General Brigham, jointly accredited by the ACCME, ACPE, and ANCC. That accreditation means 86 hours of AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™, with equivalent credit designated for nursing, psychology, physician assistants, and social work. Dr. Susan Abookire, Harvard Medical School faculty, former Chief Medical Officer, and certified Forest Therapy guide, leads the program with Ronna Schneberger, one of the first Forest Therapy guides in Canada and Chair of Nature and Forest Therapy of Canada. The learning objectives are written the way clinical education is written, and the mentorship is aimed at a plan you can actually implement.
Why join us
The evidence for nature’s clinical benefits keeps accumulating, and the providers who know how to act on it are still few. This program gives you the training to guide, the literature to justify it, the credential to stand on, and a cohort of colleagues who understand what it takes to change a practice from the inside. You come away able to offer your patients something that costs little, harms nothing, and reaches parts of their health that prescriptions don’t.
Nature Needs You
Join the movement healing people and planet.
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