Blog

Amanda Lilley-Kelly is a Project Manager at Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber leading the delivery of net zero activity, including corporate responsibility and innovator support. In this blog she explores our journey over the past year.

Over the past 12 months, I have spent a lot of time trying to comprehend how as individuals, organisations and as a healthcare system, we can support the UK government’s ambition to achieve carbon net zero. I have always tried to play my part when it comes to the environment I live in, recycling where possible, choosing products that are more environmentally conscious, and trying not to forget my re-useable bags! However, we do have to acknowledge that these are small wins, and as individuals we will never offset the damage being caused elsewhere in our world.

One thing that has always stood out to me (and is often a good place to start if trying to make a case for net zero action), is that the climate emergency is a health emergency.
Afterall, the environment we live in has a significant
impact on our health and quality of life. We have seen over the past few years how extreme heat can affect vulnerable groups such as the elderly, and how floods can damage livelihoods and threaten lives. But what about the quality of our soil and water supply to grow nutritious food, and the stability of our supply chain to manage civil conflict or severe weather events? We must accept that our climate is changing and do everything we can to mitigate our impact, while preparing to adapt to our future climate.

Learning more about how the NHS is using its influence as an employer (4% of England’s population is employed by the NHS), purchasing power, and social influence, to drive the UK’s progress towards a net zero ecosystem has been a steep learning curve. Our role at Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber is to support healthcare innovation to improve service delivery and patient care. I’ve recently been working alongside the Integrated Care Board in Humber and North Yorkshire and carbon consultant KA2 to capture and quantify the carbon footprint of digital assets across hospitals, community care, general practice and local authority. We started with calculating the carbon footprint of laptops and printers and identified recommendations for future management of the digital carbon footprint. For example, a smaller, newer device doesn’t necessarily always mean it has the smallest footprint.

The next challenge was identifying the digitally enabled healthcare devices across the different settings (hospital, general practice, community care), and seeing how common they are. The answers would then help with which assets have the largest potential footprint, those with a low carbon profile (i.e. glucometer), but commonly used, or those with a significantly higher carbon profile (i.e. MRI scanner), but less common. We found that digital healthcare assets are likely to significantly contribute to an NHS organisations carbon footprint with lots to tackle to get a better understanding of a healthcare services entire digital carbon footprint.

I’ve also been supporting Humber and North Yorkshire with the Sheep Shed Green Award programme which champions innovative ideas to reduce carbon across the region. We awarded five projects a share of £50k with innovations including a toolkit to support clinical conversations on asthma medication management, biodiesel converter to fuel fleet vehicles from waste cooking oil, and a food waste recycling scheme for offsite processing to produce energy and re-useable by-products.  After 12 months an estimated 175,000kgCO2e was avoided, equivalent to 7600 hospital outpatient appointments. We have also captured reflections for future project delivery – such as common barriers to implementation.

Our work also includes helping companies to understand NHS priorities and develop innovations to address these needs. The support we give is tailored to each organisation and we also help companies identify funding opportunities, and support review of drafted applications with our breadth of expertise from NHS, academia and industry. If you are an innovator looking for more information on net zero in healthcare our Health Innovation Network Innovator Guide is a great place to start.

While helping the NHS reach its ambition, it’s also important we also undertake these steps as an organisation ourselves. So far, Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber has created its first Carbon Reduction Plan, calculating our baseline carbon footprint and identifying our current carbon hotspots to prioritise our carbon reduction projects. We’re also exploring training and development needs to embed net zero ambitions across all of our project delivery teams.

Reflecting on this work, I think it is important to remember that this is everyone’s job, and we all benefit from living in a better environment. We will not be able to tackle everything, but making small changes that consider the environment is a great place to start. And if you are going to start anywhere – why not use the information you have to know what is causing the greatest detrimental impact, and tackle that if you can? If you can only make one change, make it the biggest change!

If you are an innovator and would like to hear more about the NHS’s net zero ambition, or work within the NHS and want to explore how Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber could support your net zero ideas please contact netzerosupport@yhahsn.com.