Green Impact: Better Healthcare - New Partnership between NUS and CSH

We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between CSH and NUS, building on the work of their highly successful behaviour change and staff engagement programme Green Impact to make it even more relevant and tailored to the healthcare environment. Pretty exciting.

Through creating a ‘Green Impact: Better healthcare’ bolt-on to the standard programme, NHS trusts and other healthcare organisations can engage a wider base of staff and students in their sustainability work and directly engage leaders and clinicians in a relevant, impactful, and measurable way.

Here’s how it works:
Green Impact has proven to be an effective way to engage staff in sustainability. It is most successful in administrative and professional services departments. CSH’s focus on and experience in engaging clinicians means that we can bring our expertise to the programme and help ensure that it engages all staff from across an organisation, including healthcare professionals. An important part of this is relating sustainability actions to improving patient care and experience. The NUS CSH partnership will enable us to provide a programme that frames sustainability within quality improvement, helping NHS Trusts to become more sustainable while also meeting expectations for improved care quality. Our combined previous experience in hospitals and other settings also means that we appreciate the challenges faced by staff and can ensure that the programme suits their time pressures and commitments.

The Better Healthcare bolt-on will bring a number of benefits to organisations, additional to those already offered through Green Impact:

• Providing a new motivation for clinical staff to engage in service improvement – improving the quality and experience of patient care
• Encouraging a culture of resource stewardship in clinical practice – saving money and reducing carbon emissions
• Future-proofing services by directing quality improvement efforts towards the highest value projects (based on the CSH four principles of sustainable healthcare: prevention, empowerment, lean systems and low carbon alternatives)
• Improving staff morale by encouraging clinical teams to take a lead; recognising and rewarding success
• Forging closer links between the Trust and local education institutions;
• Engaging students in sustainable healthcare on the ground – developing management and leadership skills, inter-professional learning.

If you’re interested in finding out more, please contact rachel.stancliffe@sustainablehealthcare.org.uk at CSH or kim.croasdale@nus.org.uk at NUS.