Thank you for being a part of CSH in 2022!
In the depth of mid-winter, may you find beauty in the world around you. As we prepare for 2023, it is time to reflect on the past year and to look forward to new opportunities.
We are delighted that our team has grown in strength and size this year enabling us to support the growth of interest in sustainable healthcare. The number of courses, networks and Green Ward competitions has grown substantially and there are many more organisations approaching us to partner with them in delivering change through training, consultancy or research.
We have supported the first round of Green Plans for Integrated Care Systems, partnered with new specialty areas and expanded our work in Wales. The Sustainable Quality Improvement team has 4 new staff members to help deliver an exciting range of projects in diverse clinical settings and we now have 5 Nature Recovery Rangers embedded at hospital sites, working with staff and patients and community to deliver change on the ground.
Next year we will expand our programmes in the UK but also look to collaborate with others internationally to maximise the impact of our work in the coming years. There are many positive changes happening but we never forget that we are in an emergency and that every day counts. CSH has worked with partners to create many resources over the past 15 years and we want to make sure that this learning is shared as widely as possible.
We would like to thank all of the individuals and organisations who help us to make an impact via a huge range of projects: our Trustees, Associates and volunteers, our Fellows and Scholars, colleagues in other organisations, and our funders. We look forward to working with many of you in 2023.
Some highlights from 2022:
Core Team
We are delighted to welcome new faces to our core team which supports the whole organisation: Aneesa Aljahmi is our wonderful new Admin Lead with skills also in HR, and Sara Lemaitre has joined as a fantastic Comms assistant to help Vivien. We also have a great new Trustee, Mike Tomson, who is already proving himself a great addition to the Board.
Education, courses, and training
We now offer 12 short courses, including new foundation courses in Anaesthetics, Respiratory Care, and Kidney Care. This year our foundation courses were attended by 375 people and our technical courses (SusQI, Teaching SusQI and Carbon Footprinting) by 404 people.
We also launched a Board-level workshop entitled ‘Leadership for Sustainable Healthcare’ which has already been attended by 134 health system executives from the UK and Australia. Next year, it will be rolled out across three regions in England.
Finally, our heartfelt thanks to the volunteers, interns, and elective students in our sustainable healthcare placement, attended by 43 people, who contributed approximately 573 days to our work.
Carbon footprinting
2022 was a busy year for the carbon modelling team. We ran 7 carbon footprinting training courses reaching 224 participants from across the globe, grew our carbon footprinting for healthcare network, founded in November 2021, to 403 members and provided carbon footprinting support to CSH’s Green Ward Competition, fellows and scholars. At the beginning of the year, we partnered with Greener Practice to develop South East London ICS’s first Green Plan, becoming the first ICS to include a Green Plan for Primary Care. We also enjoyed working with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons on the development of a new environmental sustainability module and award for their small animal, equine and farm animal Practice Standards Scheme.
Green Ward
We have run 7 Green Ward / Team Competitions this year – across 5 Trusts and 2 Health Boards with a total of 35 teams taking part. Some of the teams have gone on to win awards outside of the competition with their projects (e.g., The IPC team from Northampton have won 2 awards with their ‘Be PPE Free’ project including an NHS Sustainability Award). Stay tuned to learn about the annual CO2e and financial savings from all 7 competitions early next year!
Sustainability in Quality Improvement (SusQI)
2022 has been an exciting year of expansion with the SusQI team. New members of the team include Rachel Mclean who joined the team in January 2022 to lead the Green Wards Programme, Hazel Walsh joined in a new role as Clinical Transformation Lead, Cath Richards joined as SusQI programme lead, and Alice Clack joined the team this year as our SusQI Education Fellow.
The SusQI Education Project successfully completed this year, saw the integration of sustainability into health professions education on quality improvement (QI) in 14 Beacon sites across the UK. The evaluation published in May this year describes how many learners involved developed a new sustainability ‘lens’ which now guides their professional practice, and how the concepts of sustainability increased motivation for and engagement with QI.
Following the success of the SusQI Education Project, 2022 saw the launch of the SusQI Academy and Beacon Site Programme, with a growing number and range of organisations from across the UK involved. The Academy is a programme of support for health-education and health-provider institutions to embed SusQI into their QI teaching and QI practice. Beacon sites gain recognition for the work they are doing to embed sustainability into their QI programmes and provides a space for leading organisations to learn from and connect with each other. Find more information on these programmes and access to our open access resources on susqi.org.
Sustainable Specialties
2022 has seen a significant increase in the numbers and range of NHS staff joining us as either sustainability fellows or scholars. Whilst we said goodbye to CSH's 12-month group scholar programme, which was run in collaboration with NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership/Cardiff and Vale UHB, this was quicky followed by two new sustainable scholars’ programmes started this Autumn. In the first, we trained and are supervising a group of 6 scholars from Cwm Taf Morgannwg UHB from a range of backgrounds, including pharmacy and catering, to implement a sustainability project in their workplace. In the second, CSH is pleased to be working with the UK Kidney Association and the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition on a Sustainable Kidney Care Scholar Programme for 6 scholars across England, Scotland and Wales.
During August, 7 new Sustainability Fellows joined CSH's Sustainable Specialties programme. These Fellows are provided a one-of-a-kind opportunity to learn about sustainability, cultivate leadership and quality improvement skills, and contribute to an exciting new dimension of healthcare. When they return to clinical practice, they become life-long ambassadors for sustainability in their specialty. Our new fellows come from a range of backgrounds, including ITU/anaesthesia, oncology, paediatrics, surgery, value-based healthcare and dentistry.
Green Space for Health
There has been a lot of green space activity in 2022, as we were awarded a grant from the government’s Trees Call to Action Fund to expand our tree planting work with healthcare sites.
Felicity Harris has joined the Green Space for Health team as the new Programme Director, and Emma Edwards is our new Nature Recovery Ranger Manager. Our ranger programme has expanded, with five rangers now embedded at hospitals across England; the new rangers are Nick White (Liverpool), Naomi Paine (East London), Sally Johnson (Newcastle) and Billy Styles (Northwest London).
In the 2021-22 planting season, over 15,000 NHS Forest trees went into the ground. This winter, our sites will plant more than 9,000 trees at 40+ health sites in England and Wales, which will include the 100,000th tree for the NHS Forest!
This spring, we launched our second Meadows Health and Wellbeing Route in Wales, in partnership with Plantlife.
In March, the new NHS Forest website went live, and in October we held our annual NHS Forest conference on the theme of Biodiversity and Resilience.
Networks
Our sustainable networks hub, which serves as a forum for the exchange of ideas on sustainability in specialised sectors, gained a total of 1,014 new members during the year. In addition to this, we launched three new networks, Imaging Susnet, Clinical Labs Susnet, and Orthoptic Susnet.
Throughout the year, we have also been hard at work designing and building a revamped and improved networks platform that will maximise sector engagement and drive sustainable change. Susannah, our Network Hub Coordinator, led this initiative, in addition to expanding and managing the current networks platform and nurturing their communities of practice.