SUSTAINABILITY
say it’s unusual for a Trust to have a full Plan yet, or even a Climate Change Risk Assessment for a number. It’s something that many will need external help with, so you can understand why it hasn’t been a high priority, because realistically, that’s money that could be spent elsewhere.” With the Russian invasion of Ukraine
There are currently a number of cost and practical barriers to wider take-up of hydrogen as a power source, industry observers point out.
Our next discussion topic was a tool that Beth Goodwin said had proven very useful to Trusts drawing up the ‘predecessors’ to Green Plans, and early such Plans, but which had recently been temporarily withdrawn – the Sustainable Development Assessment Tool, or SDAT. The tool, and the NHS’s Net Zero drive, aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals – ‘the absolute gold standard for sustainability’.
The SDAT She said: “The SDAT, which had evolved over time, incorporated 298 questions, but is now being updated, so is temporarily unavailable. Timing-wise this wasn’t great for Trusts creating Green Plans. The SDAT questions cover areas ranging from clinical healthcare models, to the estate, to how you look after your staff and biodiversity. The questions were in topics very relevant at the time, but when the new Green Plan guidance emerged, it came with its new topics as headings, and these don’t align perfectly. Thus, where Trusts have chosen to use the old SDAT, those topics have had to be reallocated into the current topics to be relevant.” Beth Goodwin said she expected a new tool to replace the SDAT to be published during the first half of 2022. She added: “When Trusts are the doing their mid-point review of their Green Plans, in, say, 18 months, they’ll probably use the new tool and update their targets and progress against it.”
Enthusiasm and support I asked if, to date, Inenco had encountered a general enthusiasm and support for the Green Plans from Trusts. She replied: “It depends on the organisation, and who you speak to. A lot of the associated work is still being done within ‘Estates’, with responsibility for getting Green Plans completed mostly still landing on an Energy or a Sustainability manager, supported by a Board Sustainability lead. EFM people have always championed this agenda, and most NHS Energy or Sustainability managers are incredibly
passionate, and have spent a long time trying to drive this agenda forward with limited funding or engagement. So, they absolutely want this to happen.”
‘Not my job role’ “Where we found some difficulties,” she continued, “was in the departments where it hasn’t touched them. For instance getting some HR and clinical teams engaged has been hard. Similarly, there were always people really keen to help, but others taking the view that this isn’t their job. I think one key target most people have for their Green Plans’ first year is educating the workforce, because for every NHS employee, sustainability needs to be part of their job role, embedded during the induction process and via ongoing training, and on their central intranets; something they see every day at work.”
Shifting to another finding of Inenco’s
work with Trusts on Green Plans, Beth Goodwin said adaptation seemed to have been ‘somewhat forgotten’. She elaborated: “I’d like to emphasise how crucial it is. So, understanding your sites and the investment you’re going to put into them must start with asking: ‘Are they viable?’ For a number of Trusts, some of their sites may be at significant flood risk from climate change, and sea level rises could impact them. They don’t necessarily know if they are protected by defences, and need to talk to their local council about that. Trusts need to ask: ‘Are my are local communities still going to be my local communities, or will they need to relocate?’ When you start looking at that level of planning, the location of your estate is crucial. You need to understand your climate change risk, what your Adaptation Plan is, and what is going to impact your local area.”
Adaptation Plans in place? I wondered how many NHS Trusts across England actually had Adaptation Plans in place. Beth Goodwin said: “I’d
having just begun when we spoke, I asked Beth Goodwin if she could comment on the impact on energy and gas prices. She said: “It’s interesting. We have a number of Trusts we procure for, for whom we hedged their pricing in 2020 and for the coming years. They’re thus not impacted by the current pricing spike. However, if your electricity and gas prices are quite low, and you’re submitting a business case for a sustainability project, your payback will be quite long. Conversely, with prices currently very high, if you were now to submit a business case for anything that optimises your estate, you’ll start to see very short-term paybacks, because your electricity and gas costs are so high.”
Getting projects through at Board level This, she said, highlighted how ‘artificial’ a mechanism payback was for proving a project, but the current price scenario would benefit a number of Trusts via the ability to get projects through at Board level due to the short paybacks. Beth Goodwin said: “We’re encouraging our Trusts to implement as much efficiency and optimisation as they can now, in case the market is still high in 2024.” Beth Goodwin said Inenco was seeing some customers anxious about security of supply, but ‘not huge concerns around it’. She qualified this, however: “We are seeing suppliers contacting those with on-site generation assets and saying: ‘If we needed you to turn down and use less gas, do you have the ability to do so?’, or ‘If we needed you to switch to your oil back-up boilers, can you still do that?’ A number of Trusts might be having those conversations with their suppliers. They would be paid for their inconvenience if that ever needed to happen. We don’t think there’ll be a security of supply issue. We have a lot more LNG coming in on tankers than normally for this time of year. If we do find there is a problem, we have mechanisms in place to address it.” Beth Goodwin concluded an interesting
discussion around Green Plans, and wider sustainability and supply issues for the healthcare sector, by conceding: “The current scenario does, however, show how crucial it is for the NHS to continue to have a good back-up power source – a key problem when you are looking at decarbonising gas, because if you consider this, the oil back-up will have a significant carbon impact.”
May 2022 Health Estate Journal 41
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