Doctors urged to rethink prescribing parkrun as a health intervention

General practitioners are now "prescribing" parkrun for their patients as part of a social prescribing initiative to promote preventative care. But in The BMJ today, Dr Margaret McCartney argues that turning parkrun into a prescription medicalises a walk in the park and is a retrograde step.

Parkrun is an organized, timed, and free 5 km run, jog, walk, or wheel on Saturday mornings-in parks, on beaches, or on trails around the world but mainly in the UK, where it originated. 

Parkrun has some paid staff, but the work of setting up, timing, and result processing is done by local volunteer teams. Around 200,000 people now take part each week.

"I love parkrun and believe that it can make a real difference to public health," writes McCartney. But "prescribing"? Prescribing is for drugs that are, in general, deemed too dangerous for the public to have direct access to. Are we really meant to encourage people to consider exercise in the same domain? 

Turning parkrun into a prescription makes it less about pleasure and fun, more like work and compliance, she argues. "This approach doesn't support patient autonomy or embedding social resources for a community. Instead, it grapples with gatekeeping and-literally-medicalises a walk in the park."

What's more, prescribing parkrun is not, as some researchers have described it, a "simple, cost effective solution for sustainability, improving wellbeing, reducing loneliness, and disease prevention."

While some people may very much like it, get all of these advantages, regularly attend, and enjoy all the benefits that come with socialising, fresh air, and friendly venues for exercise, McCartney points out that 43% of people who register for parkrun don't attend, 22% participate only once, and people who describe themselves as physically inactive are less likely to return.

The Royal College of General Practitioners' approval for "prescribing" parkrun could also be considered catnip to commercial sponsors, she adds. For example, the Advertising Standards Authority previously told Healthspan, a vitamin supplier, to change its health claims after parkrun included one of their adverts in their newsletter.

"I still go to parkrun. But partnerships risk commercial opportunism, and medicalising exercise is a retrograde step. Resources should belong to the community, not to doctors," she concludes.