GIRFT is partnering with Exeter University to support the NHS in reducing its carbon footprint and promote environmentally sustainable models of healthcare.
Exeter University has been awarded £6.5m from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to establish a national hub delivering research to address the challenge of decarbonising healthcare pathways.
As part of this work, a research team from the GIRFT programme will identify eight patient pathways with the opportunity to lower the NHS carbon footprint and develop decarbonisation guides to support NHS trusts in moving towards a ‘greener’ NHS.
GIRFT has designed a programme of research specifically aimed at reducing healthcare’s environmental impact whilst also maximising the co-benefits of improving the efficiency and productivity of the NHS, and the quality of care for patients. Minimising impacts on (and ideally reducing) existing health inequalities will also be a focus of the work. Pilot work by GIRFT in bladder cancer care has reviewed patient pathways and highlighted opportunities to mitigate their environmental impact.
Working with the Exeter hub, GIRFT will support trusts to take steps to reduce the carbon footprint of bladder cancer care and other treatment pathways within urology and trauma and orthopaedics. This involves developing pathway guides that focus on low carbon models of care such as one-stop hospital appointments, remote consultations, and measures to promote early recovery and care in community settings.
The Exeter research hub will develop a toolkit which involves mapping current carbon emissions and other pollutants, and predicting their impact on environmental sustainability, financial aspects, patient health outcomes, efficiency, and equity of access. The GIRFT research team will identify the co-benefits of carbon reduction plans, such as improved efficiency and productivity and opportunities to reduce health inequalities. An implementation guide will support NHS trusts in delivering carbon reduction measures.
The work supports NHS England’s commitment to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2045. GIRFT is working closely with NHS England’s Greener NHS programme, using GIRFT’s hall mark methodology of a data-driven and clinically led approach. By embedding environmental impact assessment into healthcare decision-making and research processes, it is hoped to foster and embed a culture of environmental sustainability within the NHS.
We are excited to be a central partner in this net zero research hub. GIRFT will lead research about how we can identify and rapidly scale approaches to making clinical care more sustainable. We will test and improve a novel methodology that was developed within the GIRFT programme. It combines the data-driven and clinically-led GIRFT approach with carbon emissions modelling, to identify the important areas that we need to decarbonise. A cornerstone of the GIRFT approach is our collaborators, and we thank the specialty associations, Royal Colleges, charities, and patient volunteers who helped to shape our pilot work, and who have pledged to support the future progress of this research.
Supporting partners:
- British Association of Urological Surgeons (BAUS)
- British Association of Urological Nurses (BAUN)
- British Association od Day Surgery (BADS)
- Royal College of Physicians
- The Urology Foundation
- Fight Bladder Cancer
