SUSTAINABILITY
Creating, developing, and refining your Green Plan
As part of the wider NHS drive towards ‘Net Zero Carbon’, NHS Trusts across England must now create, develop, monitor, and report to their Board at least annually, on progress with a Green Plan. In a recent webinar held in association with HEJ, two speakers from business utility and sustainability consultancy, Inenco, explained the background to, and rationale behind, Green Plans, the key steps in creating an effective such plan, and some of the best ways to encourage staff employed in a wide range of roles to play their part in achieving the targets set. They also considered some of the practical and financial challenges to implementation, and how to overcome them.
Seeking to provide some clarity to healthcare estates professionals tasked with coordinating the creation and delivery of a Green Plan were Beth Goodwin, a Senior Account manager for Inenco’s NHS clients in the North of England, and David Oliver, Inenco’s Product and Insight manager, and a member of its ‘Solutions’ team, which delivers bespoke energy and sustainability services. The title of the webinar was ‘How NHS Trusts can turn compliance into an opportunity – by creating an effective Green Plan’. Inenco, an ISO 14001-certificated organisation, is a business utility company with over 50 years’ energy and utility management experience, which in 2020 alone procured energy worth £86 million for NHS Trusts. In a brief introduction, I introduced the two co-presenters, gave a short overview of what they would cover, and highlighted a key point made by Inenco – that with health and social care activity currently contributing some 4-5 per cent of the UK’s carbon footprint, without greater focus on delivering environmental sustainability service-wide, the NHS’s recent ‘Net Zero Carbon’ commitment could be ‘in peril’.
The ‘journey’ to Green Plans Beth Goodwin then began the presentation by explaining the backdrop to NHS Trusts in England being required to create ‘Green Plans’, ‘and the journey taken to get here’. She said: “Healthcare’s climate footprint is equivalent to about 4.4 per cent of global net emissions, and the NHS actually produces higher emissions than the global average for healthcare, being responsible for about 5.4 per cent of the UK’s total carbon emissions (according to data from Health Care without Harm’s Healthcare Climate Footprint, and Arup). Here, she handed over to David Oliver, to ‘talk through some of the history and future targets’. He began: “The journey NHS England has
Beth Goodwin.
been taking started back in 2008 with the original Climate Change Act; the Government was then pledging an 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 compared with a 1990 baseline. Simultaneously, the NHS established the Sustainable Development Unit, and tools such as the Good Corporate Citizen Self- Assessment Tool were created.” While the NHS in England’s Sustainable Development Management Plan had been mandated under the NHS contract in 2009, uptake had been slow, resulting in 2017’s launch of the Sustainable Development Assessment Tool, or ‘SDAT’, to provide standard questions which Trusts could use to assist in measuring their sustainability for their SDMP. When, in 2019, the Government committed to a Net Zero 2050 goal, it was clear that the NHS needed to up its progress. David Oliver said: “The SDMP was re-branded into ‘Green Plans’ in January 2020, with a requirement for all Trusts to have a plan
David Oliver.
that includes actions to deliver the sustainable development-related NHS Long Term Plan commitments.”
A ‘raft of additional commitments’ Since January 2020, there had been ‘a raft of additional commitments’. For example, the NHS Operational Planning and Contracting Guidance 2020/2021 had committed all NHS organisations to purchasing 100 per cent renewable electricity by this April, an action which David Oliver said would have ‘a huge impact’ on reducing the service’s overall carbon footprint. At this point, he explained that he and his co-speaker had felt it would be useful to consider ‘the NHS carbon emission story so far’, focusing purely on electricity and gas usage for buildings, before discussing Green Plans in more detail. To facilitate this, Inenco had modelled a ‘generic’ small acute hospital site, with an initial electricity consumption of 12 GWh, and
March 2021 Health Estate Journal 31
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 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76
