Dr Mark de Souza is the Chair of the Sustainable Healthcare Committee, (Top End Region, NT Health), Senior Staff Specialist in Emergency Medicine at the Royal Darwin and Palmerston Regional Hospitals in the Northern Territory. Mark is the leader of the volunteer-led greening program of the Royal Darwin Hospital site. Mark has been responsible for coordinating the mapping of land surface temperatures, integrating Indigenous perspectives, and providing justification for the rationale for site and plant species selection.
Mark has hung up the stethoscope and now studies fulltime with the University of Melbourne, researching “The experience of biodiversity in hospital settings and its influence on wellbeing in nursing and medical staff”. The scholarship is supported by the Melbourne Biodiversity Insititute.
His research seeks to improve our understanding of how nurses and doctors currently experience nature while working in Australian hospitals. The project will also examine staff preferences and barriers to accessing campus greenspaces, and how workplace nature impacts staff stress, wellbeing and job satisfaction. The research findings will be used to make recommendations for better integrating nature in hospital settings to promote the wellbeing of all campus users, while mitigating the burnout and attrition of frontline hospital staff.
