Changing climate, changing hospital, changing choices.
Here at CUH (and across the NHS), we are very aware that the climate is changing. It is speeding up a wider environmental crisis, is largely caused by human actions, and is creating increasingly dangerous impacts on human health.
This ‘climate emergency’ is already changing our hospitals. We are adapting our buildings and services to hotter summers, heavier rainfall, and pressure on utilities. At the same time, we are managing the impacts on our supply chains from severe environmental events across the world. We can take action today to manage and reverse this change, or be changed by it in ways that make it harder and more expensive to run a hospital as the crisis deepens.
At the heart of the problem is the way we currently buy most things, use them and then throw them away. The result is a ‘conveyor belt’ of loss and destruction caused by high:
- Carbon
- Pollution
- Waste
Changing our choices in all these areas is vital to tackling the climate emergency. We must decide to buy, use and dispose of things with an environmentally safe and healthy future very much in mind. Deeply embedding the core principles of reducing, reusing, repairing, high value recycling and switching to renewables is at the heart of these changing choices - wherever it is safe and viable to do so.
Our Green Plan 2: 2025-27
Our new Green Plan (2025-27) builds on the success of the first (2022-24). The new plan is all about how we put these essential changing choices into action to achieve the transformation from the fossil-fuelled “linear” conveyor-belt to joined-up renewably powered “circular” ways of consuming energy, goods and materials. This means we become active and responsible partners in not making the climate emergency worse, whilst also protecting our services so that we can continue to provide safe, kind and excellent healthcare to all our patients both today and tomorrow.
The foundations of CUH’s green planning are built on three core principles. Each of the 44 actions in Green Plan 2 use these principles so that the outcomes are real, significant and lasting.
Lifecycle Thinking
We must look beyond our standard ideas about what makes a good choice for the goods and materials that CUH purchases. Currently, choice is based on usability, cost, compliance and convenience. We must also consider the carbon, pollution, waste and social fairness impacts that occur up and down the supply chain in providing us with what we consume.
Connecting Budgets
We must recognize that if we do not make environmentally sound buying choices (to drive down carbon, pollution and waste) then the resulting climate chaos and ecological breakdown are going to make running CUH very expensive. We need to borrow from tomorrow’s immense cost of running a hospital in the face of a changing climate.
Devolving Responsibility
We must recognise that we are all consumers, and all have a very real part to play in making consumption choices for climate safety and resilience. We must all take responsibility in bringing lifecycle thinking and connected budgets together at the point where they can best be used to reframe what we buy, how it is used, and then disposed of when we no longer need it.
Using these principles to drive our Green Plan actions should put us on track to halve our direct carbon emissions by 2032 and progressively work to drive out pollution, waste and the loss of natural resources associated with healthcare delivery at CUH.
Please let us know if you need any more information or can support us in any way.