JOINT IHEEM NI AND ROI 2022 CONFERENCE
The speaker, together with (seated, left to right) Paul Fenton, William Walsh, CEO of the Sustainability Energy Authority of Ireland, and Bill O’Reilly, take questions from the audience.
support of the HSE Board, had initiated the development of a Climate Action & Sustainability Strategy, expected to be completed by mid-August this year. This, he explained, would fully align with the ‘requirements, actions, and targets’ set out in the Climate Action Plan 2021, and seek to exceed those requirements ‘by acting as exemplars in the areas of climate action and sustainability in the health sector, encompassing climate adaptation and population health approaches as well’. The HSE speaker said the Strategy would incorporate ‘a range of areas of focus’ – including ‘Infrastructure /estate’, ‘Procurement’, ‘Medical and Clinical services’, ‘Climate change and adaptation’, ‘Sustainable green environments’, and ‘Measurement and assurance’ – to ensure a reliable way of tracking progress over time, with a view to having a ‘whole system approach’ to achieving a Net Zero health system ‘by no later than 2050’.
New Infrastructure Working Group Dean Sullivan told delegates: “We will be establishing an Infrastructure Working Group, which will be of particular interest to today’s audience. We will be seeking to reduce further our facilities’ energy consumption, to tackle Scope Three emissions relating to construction via the adoption of Modern Methods of Construction, to encourage the use of circular construction economy approaches to healthcare facilities’ design and construction, to address energy efficiency and the use of renewables in our existing capital infrastructure, and to progress water reduction programmes.” The HSE was also looking at a climate action focus in relation to procurement – a goal reflected in the role of a Procurement Working Group. This Group would seek to improve supply chain resilience, and incorporate the requirements of the national Green Public Procurement Guidelines – as published recently by Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency – to reduce Scope Three emissions by looking at non-medical equipment, business services, food and catering –
20 Health Estate Journal September 2022
The conference programme had a strong focus on sustainability, and featured high-profile speakers from both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
including ‘healthy buying’, and reducing food waste.
Two key estates-led strategies Dean Sullivan said: “As an Estates Department we are currently developing two key strategies – one is an Infrastructure & Decarbonisation strategy, and the second a wider property strategy. Both of these key Estate-led developments will complement the wider approach within the HSE to climate action and sustainability.” The Infrastructure and Decarbonisation Strategy was currently under consultation, and addresses ‘the priority area’ of infrastructure decarbonisation, ‘providing a clear pathway to decarbonise our health service, its energy systems, and buildings’. The HSE speaker said: “The Strategy and roadmap build on the work already done by the Capital and Estates offices around the country, and I know the session later today will go into that work in a lot more detail.” He continued: “The wider HSE Property
Strategy seeks to address our healthcare estate challenges by setting up a clear direction for the future management and development of the HSE’s estate, aiming to develop a financially and environmentally sustainable, fit-for- purpose estate, which can support both today’s and the future’s service needs of patients and staff. It incorporates the climate action decarbonisation targets by employing an energy-efficient and ‘towards Carbon Zero design’ approach, seeking to move to adoption of Modern Methods of Construction and circular economy approaches, with a shift away from the linear approach of extracting materials, using them to construct, and then discarding them at the end of their life.” Instead, the HSE’s focus will be on raw material reduction, retention, and re-use.”
National estates information system Recognising the need to be a data-driven organisation, HSE is also rolling out a national estates information system, which Dean Sullivan said would help the organisation much better manage
its healthcare estate. The new IT system would, he said, play a key role in helping the HSE build an effective, sustainable estate ‘with a responsive workforce, and the capacity, ability, and flexibility, to meet the changing healthcare environment’. Before closing, Dean Sullivan paid tribute
to Ireland’s Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, and the support that its CEO, William Walsh (who spoke immediately following him) and his team had provided to the HSE in its efforts to reduce energy use and move towards carbon zero. He said: “It’s been a shrewd partnership approach, which has evolved into a multi- annual jointly funded programme. This has enabled the establishment of a national network of energy teams within the HSE at our large facilities, with the recruitment of a number of Energy Officers, together with the progression of shallow retrofit works which have already achieved significant energy savings.” It had also supported progression of a pilot ‘deep energy retrofit’ project, which would be upscaled to inform the HSE’s national approach to retrofitting its existing buildings as part of the achievement of the targets it is working towards.
Time for universal action As he closed his address, Dean Sullivan said: “In closing, I would like to re-state that the climate crisis is a health crisis. Now is the time for us all to act to ensure that sustainability and climate action become an integral and guiding element to our work and what we do as organisations in our service planning, our capital property planning and delivery, our emergency response preparations, and indeed in our day-to-day operations.” The EFM community, he argued, now had ‘a relatively small window of opportunity in which to act to prevent the more severe impacts of climate change’, and he and his HSE colleagues were ‘fully committed to doing so’. Thanking the conference’s organisers for the invitation to speak, he wished all attendees ‘every success’ with the remainder of the day, and the rest of the conference.
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