Commentary from Dr Phil Davison, the College’s
Specialist Adviser on Sustainable Healthcare and Chairman of the SE
Division
In collaboration with colleagues, the project:
A Service Line Analysis of Nottinghamshire Healthcare’s Carbon
Footprint has been successfully completed. This exiting project
calculated the carbon cost of mental health services and analysed
the carbon footprint of a Mental Health Trust at the level of
constituent services.
When the results are disseminated, the project
will engage clinicians and patients in the goal of carbon
reduction. It will ensure that we all consider carbon reduction as
one of the drivers in the redesign of future services.
The project has produced many recommendations,
but one is that a standard unit, e.g. carbon cost per patient, must
be agreed. This is needed to compare one Trust to another or one
service to another.
The Chief Executive, Vanessa Cameron, and her team are having
considerable success within the College, and are completing a
number of sustainable initiatives which are embedded in the 10:10
campaign.
We are working up the proposal to fund the
first sustainable fellow in psychiatry, using the successful model
in Nephrology. We are seeking assurances of funding from our
partner organisations. Once in post, the fellow will disseminate
the results of the service line project as well as other projects,
and raise the profile of sustainability with our colleagues.
Sustainable Mental health services will
require transformation in order to meet the Climate Change Act’s
target of 80% carbon reduction by 2050. Less of the same is not the
answer; there will need to be a radical change in clinical
practices. The sustainable fellow will engage members and start the
work of transformation.
NHS Sustainable Development Unit has launched
its new publication
Sustainability in the NHS: Health Check 2012. This
short document gives an insight into how NHS leaders and the public
view sustainability in the health service. It demonstrates the
public’s desire for a more sustainable healthcare system, and
indicates how sustainability can save your organisation money as
well as saving the environment.
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