SUSTAINABILITY Taking ownership


The speaker said NHS organisations needed ‘to take some ownership and put some structure behind’ what they were doing. “Clearly,” she told delegates, “the built environment is a massive part of what we do. We have a major challenge to to get our NHS estate down to Net Zero Carbon. We will also need to start to push the boundaries, and see if we can make more of our activities ‘carbon- positive’, because there are some aspects of our clinical care that we probably won’t be able to get down to Net Zero Carbon. We will thus need to play our part, as estates and facilities professionals, in offsetting overall NHS carbon emissions.” Turning to the work around


sustainability being undertaken centrally by she and her team, Prof. Daly said areas being addressed included ‘the original, Lord Carter targets to save some money in the system’, as well as ‘data, strategy, and structure’. She added: “We have also been looking at how we can invest in our systems, and at how we can make valuable data more accessible to Trusts, and especially to healthcare estates management teams. We have also benchmarked all NHS Trusts’ energy data, and are just about to update the resulting data.” Once this data had been published (it was published during November both on the Collaboration Hub and the NHS England and NHS Improvement websites), Trusts and their Estates & Facilities Departments would be able to clearly see and compare with their counterparts (such as acute Trusts of a similar size) their energy use per square metre, and per patient. The NHSE/NHSI team had also been compiling data to enable benchmarking of carbon emissions, a process facilitated by the latest ERIC returns being ‘much more granular, down to a site level’. Trusts would, for example, from this year be able to ‘see where they sit’ within their region.


The ‘Stretch’ programme Professor Daly explained that, as part of the drive to embed sustainability across the NHS, the team had also developed the ‘Stretch’ programme, which comprises ‘11 interventions that every (NHS) organisation should do, and can look at doing, to improve efficiency, save money, and reduce carbon emissions’. She elaborated: “These interventions are really simple things, such as lagging pipes, upgrading lighting to LED, and a whole raft of other simple measures we can take to improve our efficiency and reduce our emissions.”


Returning to the Net Zero Carbon theme, Prof. Daly explained that, to help NHS healthcare provider organisations, she and her colleagues had recently created a ‘tool’ to help determine what reaching a Net Zero Carbon emission level


32 Health Estate Journal January 2020


The public sector used about 60 Twh of energy in 2017, with the majority split between education and health


State Secondary Schools ~10%


Offices ~9%


n Education (34%) n Health (29%) n Local Government (18%) n Central Government (13%) n Emergency Services (7%)


Leisure Centres ~7%


Theatres >1%


NHS ~29%


State


Universities ~12%


Primary Schools ~11%


MOJ ~3%


MOD ~7%


Other ~1%


DWP ~1%


DfT ~1%


HO >1%


Figure 1: NHS contribution to public sector energy consumption in England, 2017.


would mean for the service, ‘how we get there’, and ‘how we set up a suite of interventions and investment over the coming years that will allow us to achieve that’. She said: “This Net Zero Carbon tool is now available for use, although I am open to amending it in response to feedback from estates and facilities professionals. Essentially,” she explained, showing a slide of circular chart representing the tool (Fig. 2), “the circle as a whole represents our entire NHS utility emissions for estates and facilities activities, the idea being that a Trust can enter on the diagram its own utility emissions data, with the pink ring highlighting any negative impact, and the light blue outer the positive impact. Consider, for example, a hospital installing CHP generation; it may then use more gas than it did with its previous boiler plant, but it will have the benefits of electricity. It may thus move into a negative impact position for its gas, but a positive one for its electricity, and this chart/tool can reflect that.” Healthcare estates teams using this Net Zero Carbon tool should, she explained, be able to ‘see how all their utilities play off against each other’.


Tool’s key functions


In summary, Professor Daly said the tool had been developed to enable users to: n Evaluate schemes against one another for overall value.


n ‘Address complex interactions’ between utilities.


n Distil information into a digestible format for director-level finance and estates personnel.


n Track multiple projects over time and their overall impact toward Net Zero Carbon.


Currently, Prof Daly emphasised, the tool is ‘limited to use utilities only’.


National interventions Turning to discuss some of the ‘interventions’ the NHS could implement nationally to progress towards the Net Zero Carbon target, she said: “We have already discussed LED lighting, but one of the single best ‘pound invested/per tonne of carbon saved’ measures that Trusts and other NHS healthcare providers can take is to purchase renewable electricity. If every NHS organisation bought renewable electricity it would cost the service an additional £1 m per year on a £667 m bill. This represents £1.43 invested per tonne of carbon saved, and this measure alone would enable us to save nearly 700,000 tonnes of carbon, as well as putting £330 m of our spend into renewable energy to rejuvenate the sector. This is thus something we will be really phasing into our Energy Strategy. Please go back and ask your organisation about this and the opportunities for your Trust; some suppliers may enable you to switch to at no cost at all.”


AI’s role


Returning to the value of accurate data, and Prof. Daly said Artificial Intelligence would, in future, play an increasing role across a broad spectrum of NHS activities. She expanded: “On energy management, I think AI can play a major role in plugging some of our workforce gaps, and taking the energy managers we have and elevating their role. They should be the people applying their intelligence, specialist expertise, and site knowledge, to making improvements; not trudging in bill data into Excel spreadsheets month after month.”


The Professor explained that she and her team were in the early stages of a running an AI-based pilot – funded by the Innovation Team at the Department for


Emergency Services ~7%


Clubs and Community Centres >1%


HMRC 1%


DEFRA >1%


Museums >1%


Source: Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy)


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