HEALTHCARE ESTATES 2022 KEYNOTES – SUSTAINABILITY


‘UK needs to be more self-sufficient on energy’


A Net Zero and Sustainability keynote session on the second day of Healthcare Estates 2022 included a chastening look at the energy generation challenge facing the UK in the short-to-medium term, by Dame Sue Ion, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. One of her key messages was a need for a considerable stepping up in the construction of renewable energy-generating facilities, although with some renewable technologies, and also nuclear reactor facilities, there remained cost and practical hurdles to overcome.


Dame Sue Ion presented her conference address before two other speakers in the session – Councillor Tracey Rawlins, Executive Member for Environment & Transport at Manchester City Council, and Annie Shepperd, CEO at Salix Finance, gave their own standpoints on some of the key sustainability and Net Zero challenges facing the healthcare engineering and estate management sector, the wider public sector, and the UK as a whole, and discussed some of the initiatives already in hand. She was introduced by the session


chair, Ian Hinitt, an IHEEM Past-President, who chairs IHEEM’s Environmental Sustainability Technical Platform, and in his day-to-day professional role is Director of Estates & Facilities at the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust. In setting the scene for the three presentations, he reminded delegates that the NHS has set itself the target that the emissions the service controls – the so-called NHS Carbon Footprint – will reach Net Zero by 2040, and that those it can influence – the NHS Carbon Footprint Plus – by 2045. The IHEEM Past-President said: “This afternoon’s discussion with key industry influencers and experts will consider how emissions can be addressed in healthcare and wider society, and how events since the launch of NHS Net Zero – including NHS waiting list recovery, the war in Ukraine, and the fuel, food, and cost of living crisis – are presenting challenges to decarbonisation.”


A background in material science and metallurgy With these words said, Ian Hinitt introduced Dame Sue Ion, explaining that she has a background in materials science and metallurgy, and holds visiting or honorary professorships at numerous universities, including Imperial College, and the University of Manchester. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.


The recipient of the Dame Grand Cross


award in the Platinum Jubilee Honours for services to engineering, Dame Sue gained a First Class Honours degree from Imperial College in 1976, and a PhD in 1979, before joining British Nuclear Fuels, where she was Group Director of Technology from 1992-2006. She has represented the UK internationally on key committees overseeing the nuclear sector for over three decades. She was Chair of the Nuclear Innovation Advisory Board for the Government from 2015-2018, and is currently Honorary President of the National Skills Academy Nuclear. She began her address by saying


what ‘a great pleasure’ it was to be able to come to talk in Manchester ‘at this tremendous conference and exhibition’. She told the audience: “My role today is to try and set a national context for the drive to Net Zero, and to explain just how challenging it is. So, while the health sector is making some amazing steps forward, there might be some challenges


ahead in the national sense.” As Ian Hinitt had pointed out, the


world was ‘rapidly changing’, with ‘unprecedented geopolitics’ resulting in us no longer being in control of our energy supply or energy price, or the material resources that affect them both. She asked rhetorically: “So why do we still care whether energy is low carbon or not?” The answer was that the climate change impact was ‘irrefutable’. She elaborated: “We’re warming the planet up, and as a first world country, we’ve got to set a really good example, but how much do we really care, especially when we’re choosing between heating our homes, feeding our children, and making sure that our hospitals actually run – whether they are low carbon or not?”


Extreme weather events If additional evidence were needed on the human impact on our climate, there had been a number of extreme weather events; Dame Sue showed photos of


Keynote speaker, Dame Sue Ion, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, was Chair of the Nuclear Innovation Advisory Board for the Government from 2015-2018, and is currently Honorary President of the National Skills Academy Nuclear.


November 2022 Health Estate Journal 53


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