Hello! My name is Frank
For two days a week, I’m the Climate Change Lead for West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership. The rest of my time is spent as a Consultant Anaesthetist at Airedale NHS Foundation Trust.
I’ve been in post as the Climate Change Lead for about 18 months and I’ve done a lot of work in that time. Some relevant highlights, you may be interest in:
- I’ve put together a small (but mighty!) team to help me. We are currently a team of two paid posts plus a few people who kindly donate their time.
- We’ve written a strategy to help us deliver the Partnerships ninth big ambition;
“We aspire to become a global leader in responding to the climate emergency through increased mitigation, investment and culture change throughout our system”
This is available in the climate change section of our website and is currently under review.
- We’ve created networks for people from similar professional backgrounds in different organisations to share ideas and resources around sustainability. We currently have networks for:
Board level net zero leads
Operational leads (sustainability managers etc.)
Emergency department staff
Anaesthetists
Pharmacists
Respiratory care
Primary care/commissioning
Procurement
- We’ve hosted a two-day online conference and a series of lunch and learn events, recordings are on the website here and we’re planning a second series.
- We’ve done lots of work around green space, food, and transport together with local authorities and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority.
As well as refreshing the strategy, our focus now is to write our Partnership’s Green Plan. This is mandated by the Greener NHS Team at NHS England / Improvement but gives us an opportunity to map out exactly what we need to do to become net carbon zero by 2038 which is the target set by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority. To achieve this, every part of every organisation needs to understand the goal and be working towards it. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to achieve.
I’ve really noticed a change in society around climate change over the past few years. Previously, people would say things like, “I work in healthcare, climate change has nothing to do with me” but now people say, “I’m worried about climate change but I’m not sure what I can do about it.”
I think that answering that need is one of the big priorities for the team over the next year. The answer is that there’s a lot we can all do about it. For example, when we’re making a decision, we ask ourselves, “What will be in the impact of this decision on the patients, staff, other services and budget?” I think we need to be asking ourselves what the impact will be on our environment and our carbon budget too. We can lead by example as well; we can turn off computers at the end of the day, close windows and turn out the lights.
Just as important as thinking about it and leading by example is what we say. We don’t have to have all the answers, but we can all ask, “How can we make sure that this change causes as little environmental impact as possible?” or, “What are we currently doing that causes a lot of environmental harm and how can we reduce it?”
Asking these questions serves several purposes:
- It signals that we take our climate change responsibilities seriously.
- It normalises the conversation around climate change, making it easier for others to speak up.
- It starts a dialogue around what we’re trying to do, value, and “cost”. There is a strong argument that sustainability should be considered a dimension of quality in healthcare because, if the care we’re providing is causing harm elsewhere, we must ask ourselves if we’re really providing healthcare or are we simply causing more human distress?
- It gets things done which move us towards our net zero obligations.
Therefore, strong, consistent, vocal leadership about sustainability is one of the next big steps that we need to take to really get our wheels moving towards that BIG Ambition.
Of course, it would be entirely reasonable for people to think that they can’t focus on sustainability just now, there’s a pandemic on, we’re trying to manage spiralling waiting times, it is winter, we’re doing the financial planning for next year, we’re trying to get the Partnership in good shape before we become a statutory body and lots of other perfectly reasonable reasons. Sadly though, the bottom line is that climate change is not going away, the NHS is responsible for about 5% of UK emissions, demand on the NHS will increase as climate change gets worse and the time left to limit ourselves to 1.5C of warming is ever smaller. If not us then who, if not now, when
That’s a deliberately provocative statement but the team is by no means all doom and gloom – if you would like to get involved and/or discuss how we can help you transition your organisation towards sustainability then please do get in touch, we’re a friendly lot and we’d love to hear from you. Frank.swinton@nhs.net
Have a good weekend all
Frank
Catch Leeds – Green Social Prescribing Fund
Let’s Keep West Yorkshire Going! Phase 2