Thank you for being a part of CSH in 2021!

Writing on the winter solstice here in the UK, the shortest day of the year - truly mid-winter.  And then tomorrow the light will start to take over the darkness and spring will be on the way! 2021 has brought us growth and many positive things:

• We launched our Sustainable Quality Improvement website, full of free resources. SusQI continues to underpin much of our clinical programme
• We have started many more networks for people working in clinical areas, including many for Allied Health Professionals
• The Green Surgery Challenge was a very successful way to engage surgeons and others in sustainability, with several new partner organisations
• Over 1000 people have completed our online courses, and we have written short e-learning modules for Health Education England, freely available in the NHS
• COP26 was interesting and provided us with the opportunity to collaborate with other sustainable healthcare organisations, and make connections in other countries
• The NHS Forest expanded by over 4,000 trees during the 2020/21 tree-planting season, and this winter 66 NHS Forest sites have plans to plant over 12,000 trees
• A major highlight of 2021 has been our Nature Recovery Rangers Programme, which has brought wonderful green recovery to places and people and continues to expand

Our team has doubled in size to 30 people and we are definitely set up to work mostly remotely, with people hired this year from Abergavenny, Brighton, Bristol, Liverpool, London, Norwich and Paris, as well as Oxford.

As always, the CSH team has been amazing, supporting one another to make the best of covid working patterns. Many of us met up in June for a river swim in Oxford, and in September for a wonderful walk and sea-swim in Brighton (image above).

We are deeply saddened to have lost our wonderful Chair of Trustees, David Doughty, who died in October from a heart attack following cancer treatment. He is already sorely missed. We remember with huge gratitude the work he put in to helping us to start CSH as an organisation, his gentle, supportive wisdom and the energy which he continued to give throughout the years. We are very grateful that Gill Manning, also a longstanding trustee of CSH, has taken over as interim Chair while we appoint a new person to the role.

We would like to thank all of the individuals and organisations who made it possible for us to bring all our sustainability projects to life: our Trustees and Associates, Fellows and Scholars, colleagues in other organisations, volunteers and funders. We look forward to working with many of you in 2022.