CARBON REDUCTION AND NET ZERO
Chairing the session in which Lord Markham spoke was Alifia Chakera, head of Pharmaceutical Sustainability, Health Infrastructure and Sustainability Division, Scottish Government.
energy, and the full impact this had on energy bills worldwide, the NHS included. For these reasons, the (UK) Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has been clear that energy security is a major priority.” Lord Markham continued: “At COP 28 the Prime Minister was also clear that fighting climate change is not just a moral good; it is a fundamental to our prosperity and security.” Lord Markham said the current Government wants to ensure that the UK is ‘at the forefront of this global movement as a key energy superpower’. He added: “I think that’s an ambition we can all get behind.” The NHS had ‘a critical role’ to play in supporting these ambitions. “When you look at the facts,” Lord Markham said, “it’s easy to see why – the NHS acute estate alone occupies some 27 million square metres across over 10,000 buildings. Energy-wise, that means about 11.2 billion Kilowatt Hours of consumption every year, and an annual energy bill for NHS Trusts now averaging over a billion pounds.” There was, he noted, also ‘a huge variation beneath these numbers’, it being ‘sobering to think’ that coal-fired boilers were only very recently removed at Goole and Nottingham City Hospitals.
Heat pump use in healthcare on the rise Lord Markham said: “Over 300 NHS sites still report using oil for heating. At the more positive end of the spectrum, we’re now seeing a multitude of heat pumps installed, everywhere from Yeovil to York. Look at this in terms of carbon emissions, and in its benchmark year of 2019, the NHS’s carbon footprint was 6.1 megatonnes, equating to over 30% of public sector emissions. Add in the NHS supply chain, which is 60% of the extended footprint, and at the time the NHS had a total impact on carbon emissions equivalent to that of Croatia.” While this clearly posed ‘a major challenge’, Lord Markham acknowledged that the NHS had already ‘done an incredible job of rising to this challenge’.
38 Health Estate Journal April 2024
Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has been clear that energy security is a major priority.
He said: “We are also now in a fantastic position where all 212 NHS Trust across England have Green Plans in place, setting out a clear pathway on issues like Net Zero.” This, he said, is all aligned with a central Net Zero Estates Plan produced by NHS England, and a new NHS Net Zero Building Standard for all major NHS projects – ‘the first of its kind for a health system’. Lord Markham said that according to the latest NHS Annual Report, the NHS is now on track to meet its target trajectories on carbon for the coming years. He told delegates: “Incredibly, the NHS has reduced its emissions by a quarter since the 2019 baseline – down to 4.5 million megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.” This is ahead of the five megatonnes needed to stay on track the NHS 2014 target – which he dubbed ‘an excellent achievement showing that the
NHS is leading the way to Net Zero’. The Minister stressed that this
government remained committed to ensuring that it continues to lead the way, and that sustainability ‘remains permanently embedded in the very fabric of the NHS’. He said: “Through the Health and Care Act we placed the first ever climate change legal duties on the health system anywhere in the world. In doing so we compelled action on energy and the environment across all Trusts and Integrated Care Systems.” Now, he added, the Government was ‘going further’. He explained: “At COP 26 the Government committed to include climate issues in the forthcoming review of the NHS constitution. I can confirm that we will now bring forward a ‘green NHS constitutional value’ to meet this commitment.” This will sit alongside the NHS’s existing values,
Major LED installation at
Peterborough City Hospital “We are really excited to have been awarded the funding for this project. It will enable us to significantly reduce our carbon footprint and our energy bills. This is the first major project in our Green Plan for all our hospital sites. As we redevelop our Stamford and Hinchingbrooke sites over the next few years, we plan switch to LED lighting there too.”
Peterborough City Hospital is to become a more energy-efficient building thanks to a £3.75 m funding award that will see it switch all lighting to LED bulbs. In all 15,765 bulbs will be replaced with LED bulbs, reportedly halving lighting energy costs and carbon dioxide emissions. The Trust’s Estates and Facilities Team applied to the NHS National Energy Efficiency fund with its LED lighting proposal, and was awarded its full funding request to purchase and install the bulbs. David Moss, director of
Estates and Facilities for the NHS North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Peterborough City, Hinchingbrooke, and Stamford and Rutland Hospitals, said:
NHS Scotland
Courtesy of NHS North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
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