Team here has led and implemented over the last decade. Before joining the Trust in 2010 as Waste manager, with a remit to improve segregation and increase recycling,” he continued, “I had worked in a similar role with Newcastle City Council, where my overall goal was to reduce the Council’s environmental impact. With no other member of staff in a dedicated environmental role at the time I joined The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, I worked to establish the Trust sustainability strategy and action plan, while slowly recruiting passionate members of staff – our Green Champions. I was subsequently promoted in 2014 to head up a new Sustainability Team, and saw this as a real opportunity to build upon the Trust’s existing sustainability activities. I recruited an Energy manager, a Waste manager, and two Sustainability officers, and also established a ‘brand’ for the work: ‘Shine’ (Sustainable Healthcare in Newcastle). Working alongside the Sustainability team, we a have a Transport and Travel team, covering areas such as car parking, cycling to work, and staff hopper buses.”
A significant gap
When he first joined the Trust, James Dixon acknowledged that it was doing ‘very little beyond the basics’ sustainability-wise. He said: “My experience, talking to other Trusts, is that there remain quite a number of organisations without a member of staff dedicated to Sustainability. I have worked hard to establish our team and get its work to the current position, and it’s only after declaring a Climate Emergency last summer – with everyone on board – that people are really taking the agenda seriously. When I started here, some other big Trusts – such as Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust, and Barts Health NHS Trust in London, and Trusts in Manchester and Bristol, were at the vanguard. I used their example to strengthen my argument to the management team and Board here that – particularly as a Shelford Trust – we should be doing more here in Newcastle.” When he first arrived at the Trust, in his role as Waste manager, he had ‘almost a blank canvas’. He explained: “I was able to focus on lots of recycling, and changes to how we contracted out our waste, and ensured that we would no longer send waste to landfill. Switching our focus to energy recovery and recycling was a big win that saved significant money. I also proactively recruited ‘Green Champions’ out and about in the wards and departments, because by then we were starting to get a lot of buy-in.” These volunteers could be anyone from junior doctors and nurses, to estates engineers and cleaners. He added: “The 300 ‘Green Champions’ we now have across our two main hospitals and many smaller clinical
50 Health Estate Journal July 2020
Establishing a Strategy and Action Plan
James Dixon presenting at a packed IHEEM CPD regional seminar held on 30 January this year at St James’ Park, the home of Newcastle United FC. The event, entitled the ‘Your Climate Emergency Briefing’, was kindly sponsored by Sharpsmart.
facilities are the ward/department’s ‘eyes and ears’. It’s not a formal role; we tell them the kind of things we are doing, sharing best practice, asking them to help with sustainability communications and other things, and they also feed back suggestions – telling us about the successful projects they have run in their area. I first began recruiting them on joining the Trust; even before I was able to take on full-time staff for the Sustainability Team, and they have been instrumental in making changes across the Trust.”
Once he had begun building a team, James Dixon was able to establish a firm Sustainability Strategy, action plan, and a brand, ‘Sustainable Healthcare in Newcastle’, or Shine (as an acronym), which is now used on all the Team’s communications. He went on to describe some key successes for the Sustainability Team: “One notable achievement is that we have increased our recycling rate for non-clinical waste from under 10 per cent to closer to 50 per cent. We can now get a wide range of dry mixed materials recycled – from clean plastic or cardboard packaging, to newspapers, cans, and bottles, and even PVC masks from theatres and toothpaste tubes from the Dental Hospital. Much of the relatively small volume of waste we were recycling when I joined was confidential waste, and a little bit of scrap metal.” He added: “In the late 1990s, before I arrived, the Trust had been an early adopter of combined heat and power energy generation, on both the Freeman Hospital and the Royal Victoria Infirmary sites. We were also Europe’s first healthcare provider to bring reusable sharps boxes into the UK, in 2004. This is a great sustainability win; instead of burning the traditional disposable plastic sharps bins, you just fill the ABS Sharpsmart containers, and they are sent off to the company’s facility just south of Durham, where a robot tips the containers out, thoroughly cleans them, and they are returned to us for re-use, with the sharps sent away for incineration.” The move to these containers, James Dixon explained, represented a 90 per cent reduction in
The Royal Victoria Infirmary, with the Great North Children’s Hospital far right.
©Sharpsmart
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72
