JOINT IHEEM NI AND ROI 2022 CONFERENCE
Ensuring a long life for the future’s healthcare buildings
The second day’s second keynote speaker at IHEEM’s joint Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland conference in Dublin was Brendan Smyth, Director of Health Projects within the Construction and Procurement Delivery (CPD) Department, Northern Ireland. He took a look both at some of the major initiatives in hand in Northern Ireland to reduce the carbon impact of healthcare buildings and the estate – including during construction work, and at the need for tomorrow’s healthcare facilities to be both sufficiently adaptable for changing clinical models, and resilient to climate change.
By way of a brief introduction, Brendan Smyth explained that he is Director of Health Projects – ‘formerly known as Health Estates’, which is now part of Construction and Procurement Delivery in Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance. He said: “We were formerly within the Department of Health in Northern Ireland, and work exclusively for it.” He told delegates that having attended the conference’s first day, he had found the presentations ‘both very informative, and thought-provoking’. It had been great to hear about the initiatives taking place, and he was sure his team could ‘learn from and borrow’ some of the work that has been done. “I’ve had the opportunity, up until a couple of years ago,” he explained, “of regular exchanges with my colleagues in HSE, and have always found them very forthcoming in terms of knowledge and willingness to share information for the greater good.” He also thanked another speaker, Erin Savage of the Energy Strategy Department for The Economy, who spoke immediately before him, for her ‘very comprehensive outline of what’s happening in Government circles in Northern Ireland’. Despite him being ‘part of that organisation in the wider sense’, he said there was ‘a lot of activity happening that he hadn’t been aware of’.
Disbelievers As he turned his focus to the subject, Brendan Smyth told delegates: “It’s not that long ago that there were lots of people who were disbelievers in climate change.” Showing a slide from a recent Met Office presentation to the Northern Ireland Civil Service, he said he had been especially struck by images of the wildfires on the Mourne mountains, close to where he lives, and where he had spent many summers as a child. He discussed a fire that had happened there in April 2021, saying: “In my lifetime there have been fires on the Mournes, but nothing ever, to this extent, that did this amount of damage. When you think this happened,
The second day’s second keynote speaker at IHEEM’s joint Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland conference was Brendan Smyth, Director of Health Projects within the Construction and Procurement Delivery (CPD) Department, Northern Ireland.
not at the end of a long, dry summer, but in April 2021, it’s a real indication of the absolute impact of climate change. Just to the right,” he added, “there’s a slide of Spelga Dam reservoir – which provides most of the drinking water to the greater Belfast area. The slide is from the summer of 2010, when the water levels were so low that it revealed landscapes that hadn’t been seen for many generations. Then, just prior to that, there’d been extreme flooding, in Fermanagh and Tyrone, not seen for a long, long time.”
Do we have the infrastructure? The Met Office had, meanwhile, indicated that the likelihood of extreme heat waves had increased 30 times, and of flooding, seven times, while by 2050, the likelihood was that every other summer would be like that of 2018. He said: “Do we have the infrastructure that can cope with the impact of that. So, the environment is changing, and that rate of change is accelerating.” Recent NHS data indicated that 40% of public sector emissions were attributable to the service – a ‘frightening statistic’.
In October 2020, NHS England – from which the Northern Ireland Health Service generally took its lead – had become the world’s first health service committed to reaching Carbon Net Zero, but, Brendan Smyth admitted, identifying a route to Net Zero was ‘challenging’. The NHS targets included one for the service’s carbon footprint to reach Net Zero by 2040, with an 80% reduction by 2032, ‘less than 10 years away’. He said: “That doesn’t happen by just sitting thinking about it; we have to really do things, while for the emissions that we can influence – a measure of the NHS Carbon Footprint Plus, the target is to reach Net Zero by 2045, with an 80% reduction by 2039.” The speaker added: “In January 2020 the campaign, ‘For A Greener NHS’, was launched, and since then we’ve been dominated by the global pandemic, taking our focus away from what we need to do in that respect.”
Recent initiatives implemented Brendan Smyth continued: “By way of an example, I want to illustrate some of the initiatives we’ve implemented over the last the last decade or so, to reverse
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