Some of the measures that EFM personnel can take to further reduce their estates’ carbon footprint at a time when pressure to cut energy consumption must be balanced both against the requirement to create the best possible patient environment, and new medical technology that may require substantial energy to operate, were the focus of a recent IHEEM carbon reduction seminar in London.
The one-day event, “Planning to achieve Carbon Reduction Commitment targets for healthcare premises”, also included a look at the key steps affected healthcare organisations, and especially their estates teams, need to be taking already to ensure compliance with the new Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme.
Given the high importance of carbon reduction to the modern health service, and the NHS especially, it was appropriate that the first speaker at the seminar should be the man who heads up the body specifically tasked with helping the service to achieve this goal, director of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit David Pencheon. In a speech that looked “holistically” at sustainability, focusing not just on the health sector, but equally on wider issues such as population migration, and its likely future impact, he began by emphasising that, in the face of the sizeable UK budget deficit, the NHS would, in the next few years, be expected to make “at least 5% efficiencies”. But how could estates and facilities teams best contribute to this goal via leaner operation and maintenance of equipment and facilities, and, simultaneously, get Trust financial directors to recognise that some of the savings would need to come not just from reducing energy use, but equally via more efficient procurement? Another key consideration was that, with the raft of new medical equipment now emerging, how much thought was actually going into such components’ design in terms of their overall energy consumption/efficiency? On procurement, specifically, David Pencheon said: “As a massive public organisation, with enormous spending power, the NHS should be a powerful procurer, and thus in a position, in many more instances, to purchase equipment with a lower carbon footprint.” To date, however, he believed it had “not been terribly good at this”, and buyers of equipment for healthcare facilities also needed to recognise that the private sector was “often significantly ahead in technology terms”, and might well thus be able to “provide some of the answers, in terms of supplying more energyefficient equipment, if we only actually asked suppliers for help more often”. One potentially valuable tool to help estates personnel better gauge the energy consumption/efficiency of equipment used “on their watch” in future – although by no means a new idea – might be for suppliers (as has occurred with domestic white goods for some time), to allocate an energy banding to each item to identify how “green” it is.
Spreading the sustainability message
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