Our organisations are concerned with tackling the climate emergency, protecting health from its impacts and maximising the benefits to health from responding to it.
In the paper, we discuss some of the changes in the health and social care system that emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, and lay out the six key changes that we think might do the most to help drive a healthy, green and resilient recovery.
The National Health Service has been transformed in the past months as it responds to the covid-19 pandemic, and the social care system has been severely strained. More recently, the UK Government has announced a major restructuring of the public health system in response to widespread concern from across the health community and the NHS England itself has declared its intentions to become carbon neutral by 2040.
A severe economic recession is beginning and the climate emergency is growing, bringing with it more severe heat waves, floods and storms. How we recover from the pandemic health crisis, while addressing the looming economic and climate crises, will shape both health and health inequalities for decades to come, and our resilience (or vulnerability) to all types of future crises.