On 19 September 2024, colleagues from across the health and care sector came together as part of a 90 minute webinar to learn from sustainability experts and hear more about a new tool designed to assist the NHS in meeting its goal of becoming the world’s first net zero health service.
The session, which was facilitated by NHS Arden & GEM, brought together attendees from primary, acute and community care with ambulance services, commissioners, and the third and private sectors to take a holistic look at sustainability. During the session we heard from a wide range of sustainability experts on current challenges, opportunities and best practice.
You can view the full set of presentation slides here.
Pathway to a Net Zero NHS through Sustainability and Decarbonisation
Alison Tonge, Executive Director of Strategy, Planning and Innovation at NHS Arden & GEM started out by introducing the key actions identified by the NHS to enable it to become the world’s first net zero health service and how this applies right across every part of the system. Alison emphasised the significant reporting requirements in place to demonstrate we are meeting mandatory and best practice commitments. And how reporting accuracy builds confidence and ensures that our plans are backed by the right data, the right analysis, the right expertise and the right methodology in accounting for carbon across all activities.
“More time gathering data means less time understanding it and thinking about how you can improve value.”
Alison continued by stating that we need to integrate carbon considerations into our whole approach for planning and delivering care so that our staff and patients actually believe what we’re saying. The best route to a sustainable NHS is to reduce the amount of carbon that we use.
Care Pathway and Carbon Calculation
Keith Moore from the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition (SHC) shared real world examples of care pathway and carbon calculation. As a partnership of healthcare companies and agencies, the coalition is well placed to share data and insight and develop beat practice guidance.
“To truly understand the carbon impact of drugs and devices you can’t stop at a product lifecycle accounting standard, you need to look at how they have been embedded into care pathways.”
Keith shared a number of case studies and their impact, including:
- how a haemodialysis carbon pathway review at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospital has provided insight for international sustainable kidney care efforts
- how a simple change to the pre-eclampsia pathway to introduce a new diagnostic test avoids hospital admissions and results in carbon savings.
Enhancing Social Value through Sustainability
Becky Jones, Social Value Specialist at NHS Arden & GEM, reinforced the linkages between sustainability and social value and the importance of those linkages. Becky began by defining sustainability and how sustainable practices support ecological, human and economic health and vitality. The importance of reducing Scope 3 emissions was emphasised as 66.6% of the total carbon footprint of the NHS sits within the supply chain.
Becky went on to explain what social value is, how it links to sustainability, and why it is so important to the NHS including the requirements of the Public Services Act, ICS guidelines and Public Procurement Notices.
“People and planet are inextricably linked and we have to think about the two together when doing long term planning.”
Maximising social value improves the social determinants of health, health outcomes and reduces health inequalities. Anyone interested in learning more should visit the Future NHS Social Value Network workspace.
Introducing the Net Zero Health and Care Pathway Tool
Olu Akinremi, Value Implementation Lead at NHS Arden & GEM, led a demonstration of a new tool designed to track and report carbon emissions and help implement carbon reduction initiatives. An agnostic and flexible design means that the tool can be used for informed decision-making across specific clinical pathways or be focused on a particular site.
“It also includes financial integration to calculate both the carbon intensity per patient and the carbon intensity per pound.”
The tool goes beyond decarbonisation to consider efficiency, CQUIN measures, social value, clinical effectiveness and population outcomes. The demonstration showed attendees the tool’s key features including:
- A detailed overview of the healthcare journey of a patient and the intersection of carbon emissions and financial costs
- An emissions summary by area of care e.g. primary, emergency, ambulance, planned, elective etc
- The impact of sustainability plans on carbon trajectories
- More detailed emissions and costs for each area of care.
This innovative tool simplifies the complexities of measuring, reporting and managing carbon footprints across care pathways, supporting more accurate evaluations and sustainability initiatives. It can be used effectively as part of NHS Arden & GEM’s fully managed decarbonisation support service.
Bringing People, Processes and Technology Together
The final speaker, Julian di Tomaso from Anaplan, joined to introduce participants to the importance of being able to hold and share data on an appropriate technology platform. Moving from a spreadsheet approach to a fully scalable platform enables data to be brought together and improves accessibility. Carbon change initiatives can then be more easily and accurately modelled with ongoing reporting mechanisms providing an ability to link back to finance plans, supply chain plans, and demand and capacity plans.
The Time for Action
Alison Tonge concluded by asking passionate, committed individuals from different organisations to be at the forefront of sustainable healthcare and work with NHS Arden & GEM on the next phase of the Net Zero Health and Care Pathway Tool development.
We would love to collaborate with your organisation and system. If you would like more information on the tool or contributing to the next stage of development, please don’t hesitate to contact us at agem.integrated-planning@nhs.net.