IHEEM 2019 REGIONAL CONFERENCE


Mike Ralph, FIHEEM, Principal engineer at NHSI /NHSE, and chair of the IHEEM Medical Gases Technical Platform, examined the contribution of medical gases and volatile anaesthetic agents to global warming.


‘standard practices’ in estates and facilities management – which he said could ‘refer to a multitude of different activities’ – accounted for 11%. Moving to the crux of his presentation – the Global Warming Potential (or ‘GWP’) of some of the most commonly used medical gases and inhalational anaesthetic agents, he said: “Looking firstly at Desflurane, a quite common inhalational agent, it is a bit like


IHEEM CEO, Pete Sellars, gave a presentation during the Cardiff conference highlighting the importance to healthcare estates and engineering professionals of ongoing CPD.


Cyclopropane in being quite noxious, but is extremely useful for anaesthetics due to its properties. It does, though, have a monstrous GWP of 2,540 (meaning that its Global Warming Capacity is 2,540 times worse than CO2


). In contrast,


methane has a GWP of just 25, and another very commonly used anaesthetic gas, Nitrous oxide, of 298. None of the most widely used such gases and


inhalational agents, in fact, are very good in terms of their environmental impact.”


Overall contribution to global warming


– to the NHS’s annual carbon emissions was equivalent to that of the


Mike Ralph said that in fact the overall contribution of anaesthetic gases/ inhalational agents – at around 500,000t CO2


January 2020 Health Estate Journal 39


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