Keen to identify if there remained significant potential to reduce energy consumption in a ‘typical’ operating theatre, Tom Pierce, consultant anaesthetist and clinical lead for sustainability at University Hospital Southampton, and two fellow medical professionals, Gemma Morris, a Foundation Year 1 doctor at Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital, and Beena Parker, an ST trainee in anaesthesia at Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Recently measured the electrical energy needed both for a day’s clinical anaesthesia, and to operate anaesthetic gas scavenging pumps and overhead radiant heaters. As they report, while the energy consumed by anaesthesia equipment was ‘relatively modest’, ‘disproportionately large’ amounts of electricity were required to operate anaesthetic gas scavenging systems (AGSS) and heaters. Significant energy savings should, they conclude, be achievable by switching off the AGSS out-of-hours, and placing radiant heaters on timing or thermostatic controls.
The 2008 Climate Change Act (CCA)1 set in statue the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions to 80%, of the 1991 baseline by the year 2050. In its NHS England Carbon Footprint published in 2012, the NHS Sustainable Development Unit estimated the service’s CO2e footprint to be 20 million tonnes per annum,2 of which 19% was attributed to building heating and electricity use.
The last 30 years have seen an evolution, in operating theatres, from passive, gasdriven, Boyle machines, to complex integrated electrically-powered anaesthesia workstations with integral monitoring, as well as the widespread use of electrically-powered fluid flow controllers and syringe drivers. Comparative electrical performance is obtainable from data sheets, enabling purchasers to choose products with the lowest in-use energy consumption, although the complexity of making calculations based on whole-of-life can be daunting.3 In order to make sense of such data, we undertook to make the first published attempt to measure the total in-use electrical energy consumption required to provide a day’s anaesthesia. Further, to reduce the carbon footprint and to comply with the requirements of the CCA, we felt it necessary to be able to identify where, if possible, electrical energy savings could safely be made.
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