SUSTAINABILITY
Moving sustainability even higher up the agenda
‘Sustainability in the NHS’ was the title of a first day presentation by Professor Fiona Daly, Sustainability & EFM Workforce lead at NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE/NHSI), in the ‘Strategy & Leadership’ steam at October’s Healthcare Estates 2019 conference in Manchester. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Fiona Daly – who was made an Honorary Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management in February 2019 – joined the NHSE/NHSI central Estates & Facilities team in November 2017, and has extensive experience in sustainability. Earlier in her career she was Environmental manager, and, latterly, associate director of Sustainability and Patient Transport, at Barts Health NHS Trust, and prior to joining Barts, was Implementation manager at Skanska UK for seven years. A Board Trustee at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare since January 2017, she was awarded a Master of Science (MSc) in Healthcare Leadership by the University of Birmingham in 2015, and a Senior Healthcare Leadership Award from the NHS Leadership Academy in 2016.
Beginning her address, Prof. Daly said she would be talking through in her presentation the NHSE/NHSI strategy for sustainability, in line with the Government’s latest commitments to ‘Net Zero Carbon’. She explained: “The Government has signed up for the UK to be Net Zero Carbon by 2050, and the Climate Change Act has been aligned to reflect this. This underpins a range of previous and ongoing policies, alongside a need for the NHS to reduce its overall costs and significantly increase its efficiencies. “
A drive around critical issues The NHSE/NHSI speaker said the NHS Long Term Plan ‘made it really clear’ that the NHS was driving towards these goals, with a major focus on some of the key health-related issues, such as air pollution. Prof. Daly said: “You will also be aware of the call for a major reduction in the use of single-use plastics, and again, that is a key element in the NHS Long Term Plan.” She continued: “There is also a lot to do around energy, waste, and water, and the associated carbon emissions, against the backdrop of considerable political activity. You will all have seen the activities of Extinction Rebellion – a high-profile example of current environmental
we are already doing quite a lot towards that goal. Later, I will talk through some of the specific interventions and direction of travel we are creating at the centre to shift NHS organisations towards these ambitions.”
Focusing on some specifics, and on the question: ‘What does Net Zero Carbon mean?’, Prof. Daly said: “I think it means we need to transform the way we do business in the NHS across the board. We need to look at our leadership, and at how, for example, NHS Trusts, and particularly Estates & Facilities Departments, are led. We need to look at our operations – everything that that we make, buy, and throw away, and at how we operate and refurbish our buildings. Equally, we need to consider what we do when we get capital money, and at how we educate our people – to ensure that everybody understands and ‘owns’ the importance of a sustainable NHS estate.”
Fiona Daly – who was made an Honorary Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management in February 2019 – joined the NHSE/NHSI central Estates & Facilities team in November 2017.
activism and campaigning.” There had also, she said, been ‘a real slow chip away, through legislation’, on the environmental and carbon-saving front, against a backdrop of what the speaker dubbed ‘a massive increase in health and social inequalities in the UK, which is evident at the doors of NHS hospitals every day’. Against this backdrop, the Professor said it was vital that the NHS looked to drive some of the changes required to reduce its negative impact on the environment.
Largest public sector emitter With the NHS the largest single public sector carbon emitter of all England’s Government bodies (Fig. 1), Prof. Daly said it was critical that the service not only drove change through its actions on sustainability, but was also seen as a real public exemplar of how the public sector could move forward. She added: “I think
Sustainable Development Management Plans
As many in the audience would know, all NHS organisations in England are now required to have a Sustainable Development Management Plan (SDMP). To date, Prof. Daly explained, such plans had been developed across 71 per cent of the service, although she said there was ‘quite a disparity in quality’ between them. During 2018, NHSE/NHSI had published guidance to help NHS Trusts ‘re-vamp’ their SDMPs, and to ‘write them in a more pragmatic way’. Prof Daly said: “We have had a phenomenal response to this initiative, with a lot of NHS organisations contacting us because they have been updating their plans. We have also had a lot of activity through our EFM Collaboration Hub – our central communication channel with the system, which links individuals working in different Trusts to one another to gain insight into specific questions/problems that they are grappling with. Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust was the first to launch its plan in line with the new guidance, and it has made its Sustainable Development Management Plan open to everyone.”
January 2020 Health Estate Journal 31
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