The management of kidney disease is often resource-intensive and environmentally impactful. Recognising this, the renal community has long been at the forefront of efforts to improve the sustainability of healthcare and reduce avoidable harm to people and planet alike. There is, now, a need for urgent action to meet national goals for a Net Zero NHS.
The current initiative, therefore, draws together a collaboration of not just the Green Nephrology Group in Newcastle but also industry – an approach that is essential given that an estimated 65% of greenhouse gas emissions from the delivery of UK healthcare derive from hospitals’ supply chains.
The aims of the current project are to map the haemodialysis service delivery within Renal Services in Newcastle using the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition’s Care Pathway Guidance, to use life cycle assessment approaches to understand the whole environmental footprint associated with activities – from manufacture, through service delivery to disposal – and identify opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of the service. Our ambitions are that the project will: firstly, help Newcastle Hospitals and other renal centres understand what sustainable haemodialysis might look like; secondly, that it will inform the development of metrics, recognised by the renal community and industry, alike, to allow between-centre comparisons and; lastly, that it will identify the key intervention points that could be targeted to achieve the goal of sustainable haemodialysis across the NHS.
The project is expected to report its results in early 2021.
Once complete, the programme of work will extend beyond haemodialysis to other renal care pathways to describe environmental impacts across a whole renal service and, similarly, develop metrics and identify intervention points to achieve sustainability across all its component parts.
The project benefits from expertise in environmental footprinting and, crucially, access to industry partners to provide the detailed data required for accurate outputs. The project partners are:
Renal Services at The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Sustainable Healthcare Coalition, Environmental Resources Management.