Driving a Greener Transport System within the NHS - Event Write-Up
The NHS is facing a constant challenge to deliver cost savings whilst ensuring a high standard of patient care, yet, with growing budget constraints and lack of resources, the NHS needs to find savings and cut its environmental impact down.
The annual Sustainability Day of Action celebrates the importance of sustainable development in our national health care system. This day illustrates and promotes sustainability across all 223 NHS through a variety of platforms where the sharing of ideas and collaboration aims to inspire and provide insight.
The 2021 Sustainability Day of Action went live with three webinars on the 4th of June. We invited industry leaders, sustainable business developers and influencers for sustainable development to discuss new technologies, innovations and strategies that we should implement within the NHS to become a more sustainable organisation.
Part One - Driving a Greener Transport System within the NHS
“I know that travel can also be a very emotive topic and it’s an area which can be quite challenging to make some behavioural changes. But once that behaviour change and that behaviour shift take place. The benefits are massive”
For this webinar, we invited Victoria Barlow, Senior Sustainability Officer at the Manchester University Foundation Trust and Caroline Seton Co-Founder of Human Forest to discuss new technologies, innovations and strategies that are having a positive impact on the environment and assisting the NHS in meeting the net-zero target.
To set the scene our first guest speaker was Victoria Barlow. Victoria looks after the sustainable travel agenda for the Manchester Foundation Trust. This ranges from setting the corporate framework and strategy on travel, monitoring and reporting travel data, maintaining the site level Travel Plans and enhancing travel infrastructure such as EV chargers.
For this webinar, Victoria discussed the sustainable transport challenges and provided us with an insight into how the MFT NHS trust is driving a greener transport system through new technologies and behaviours.
The Journey of Sustainable Travel at the Manchester University Foundation Trust
The MFT Trust is the largest NHS trust in England operating 10 hospitals over 7 campuses and employs around 28,000 people. Travel is widely connected with travel and with having such a large workforce the emissions alone from staff affect the environment and the NHS. “Manchester has the highest rate of emergency asthma admissions in the UK“ Victoria Barlow, Senior Sustainability Officer, MFT Trust. A study conducted by the University of Bern found that heatwaves alone caused by climate change are killing more than 200 million people a year.
“Our travel carbon footprint contributes about 8% of our total emissions, 45% made up of patient and visitor travel, and we’ve got about 50% that is made up from staff commuting”
“We use a free, free online tool called Travel line, it’s a free journey planning tool, you put in your postcode you start postcode your destination postcode and it comes up with all the different public transport options”
Throughout the past year and the effects of the pandemic, the trust has seen a 40% reduction in business mileage due to meetings now taking place online. This shift in behaviour and implementation of new technologies is already showing positive environmental benefits. The Trust also run a free shuttle bus for NHS staff and a reduced price for patients and have most recently switched eight of their diesel vehicles to electric which will help them reduce around 70 tonnes of carbon emissions per year.
When looking at sustainable travel a major challenge is changing peoples behaviours, to motivate and make this change more engaging the trust has implemented a cycling initiative where staff collect points and win prizes, this initiative has seen their site staff cycling rates double from 9% to 18%. This demonstration from the NHS Trust clearly shows there is a range of intervention that can be put in place to support the modal shift.
A Human Forest
“As a tree removes CO2 from the atmosphere, people opting to make their journey on a Human Forest e-bike emit zero greenhouse gases. Working together, trees and people can drastically reduce the amount of CO2 in the air – they become a Human Forest”
Our second guest speaker was Caroline Seton, Co-founder of Human Forest a fresh and exciting mobility company that is launching in summer 2021. For this webinar Caroline gave us an inside exclusive look at their new e-bike model that is due to launch in London in the coming weeks. Human forest is 100% sustainable and carbon neutral and is aiming to be carbon negative.
Human Forest is providing an environmentally friendly alternative solution to transportation that also reaches a wide demographic for usage and is as effective for use in cities and towns that have more hills. As well as making their bike fit for purpose to a wider audience, they have also integrated a real-time dashboard that allows journeys to be shared with colleagues that creates a community and allows for competitions. The dashboard also provides information and a greater understanding of your transport behaviour and the positive impacts this has on the environment as well as personal health benefits.
By tackling climate change through new technologies and behaviours we will become that one step closer to decarbonising mobility. If you would like to find out more please contact us here.