1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:07,080 I'm delighted to be chairing this webinar today along with my colleague Amy Booth, uh, who is also from the University of Oxford. 2 00:00:07,380 --> 00:00:14,370 My name is Sara Shaw, and I am professor of health policy and practice here at the University of Oxford. 3 00:00:14,880 --> 00:00:18,780 Um, so I'd like to formally introduce our speaker today, professor Nick Watts. 4 00:00:18,780 --> 00:00:23,159 And to take, uh, a bit of time to give a background to the talk before doing that. 5 00:00:23,160 --> 00:00:27,420 Can I just ask that everyone, please take time to introduce yourselves in the chat. 6 00:00:27,420 --> 00:00:32,820 Maybe just post your name, your role, your organisation, just so we can get a bit of a sense who's in the room today. 7 00:00:33,850 --> 00:00:36,510 And then I'm very happy to introduce Nick. 8 00:00:36,580 --> 00:00:44,049 Uh, professor Nick Watts, who's director of the centre for Sustainable Medicine at the National University of Singapore, uh, 9 00:00:44,050 --> 00:00:50,350 where he leads the centre's mission of shaping the growing field of sustainable medicine, both locally and internationally. 10 00:00:50,920 --> 00:00:55,899 Uh, Nick has a background in medicine and public policy, and many of you will, I'm sure, 11 00:00:55,900 --> 00:01:02,770 know him from his work as executive director of The Lancet Commission and later The Lancet countdown on health and climate change, 12 00:01:03,130 --> 00:01:07,510 but also from his previous role as chief sustainability officer of the NHS, 13 00:01:07,930 --> 00:01:13,330 where he led the way in taking the NHS towards becoming the first net-zero health system in the world. 14 00:01:15,280 --> 00:01:18,339 Now, as you be aware, the driver net zero is not a smooth path, 15 00:01:18,340 --> 00:01:24,220 which I think is probably why many of us are here today, and it's fraught with all sorts of politics and change. 16 00:01:24,250 --> 00:01:27,540 Um, and we've just been talking about some of the headlines in the papers. 17 00:01:27,550 --> 00:01:33,400 Uh, so we might come on to that. Um, so there've been significant achievements, which I hope you'll touch into. 18 00:01:33,400 --> 00:01:38,680 Nick. Um, but I'm sure they've been and continue to be significant challenges along the way. 19 00:01:39,100 --> 00:01:44,080 And it's for this reason that Amy and I were really keen and just delighted to hear from the horse's mouth where, 20 00:01:44,500 --> 00:01:50,890 uh, what net zero means in the context of health care and the influence of national and transnational politics, 21 00:01:51,400 --> 00:01:59,650 industry, other stakeholder interests, uh, and the media in advancing towards net zero across different settings and unpack 22 00:01:59,650 --> 00:02:04,450 really what works and perhaps what doesn't work and where we need to focus attention. 23 00:02:05,290 --> 00:02:13,320 Um, so Nick's talk today is open to all, but it also forms one part of a new course here at Oxford Focus, specifically on sustainable healthcare. 24 00:02:13,930 --> 00:02:19,560 Students, many of whom are in the room today, had a really intense week last week on that course. 25 00:02:19,570 --> 00:02:25,530 Um, looking across global north and south, considering issues of implementation and unimplemented. 26 00:02:26,470 --> 00:02:33,570 Uh, global supply chains, the role of the pharmaceutical industry, opportunities and impacts of technology and much more. 27 00:02:33,580 --> 00:02:38,799 And I think it's really good timing, Nick, to then have you here today to add to this. 28 00:02:38,800 --> 00:02:47,230 And we talked a lot about politics actually, and innovation. So um, to hear you talk about politics, innovation and change and the path to net zero. 29 00:02:48,180 --> 00:02:53,309 I know you're planning to talk without any slides. Um, just to talk for 30 or 40 minutes. 30 00:02:53,310 --> 00:02:57,540 And we're then going to open to the floor for wider discussion. Everyone in the room. 31 00:02:57,540 --> 00:03:02,550 Please do also use the chat function in the interim. Post any questions that you have there as we go. 32 00:03:02,850 --> 00:03:08,520 And Amy and I will moderate that chat. Uh, once we've finished and open up for some live discussion as well. 33 00:03:09,150 --> 00:03:16,010 Enough from me. Nick, welcome over to you. Hello, everybody. 34 00:03:17,060 --> 00:03:21,130 Thank you for having me. Um. And thank you, Amy. 35 00:03:21,140 --> 00:03:25,220 Thank you Sarah. Thank you, Robin, for for everything you've done to put this thing together. 36 00:03:25,550 --> 00:03:29,170 Um. Uh, in the first three seconds. 37 00:03:29,170 --> 00:03:33,999 You've probably got a sense. Uh, I'll try and be as informal as possible. 38 00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:38,409 And frankly, if people have questions I want to throw into the chat, if people want to try and interrupt me. 39 00:03:38,410 --> 00:03:44,500 Um, but I'm very happy with that. If you want to, uh, instead, Sarah, Amy, uh, save all those things up, we can talk about them at the end. 40 00:03:44,500 --> 00:03:49,930 But the discussion is often more important than any kind of prepared remarks. 41 00:03:50,200 --> 00:03:59,350 Um, talk a little bit about, uh, about decarbonising health care, what that looks like in the context of the NHS. 42 00:03:59,440 --> 00:04:03,070 Um, taking a look at the people that are introducing themselves. 43 00:04:03,310 --> 00:04:11,950 I mean, the chat is full of people who have a really, really great sense of what that means on the ground and what some of those challenges look like. 44 00:04:11,950 --> 00:04:15,069 So, so we can skip over. I'll move very quickly through. 45 00:04:15,070 --> 00:04:19,750 I think the first two parts of what you might want to, you know, look at when you ask this question, 46 00:04:19,750 --> 00:04:23,260 which is why why would you want to go and care about this stuff? 47 00:04:23,260 --> 00:04:28,600 The next thing is, well, once you've decided you want to care, what are you running at? What's your target call that that the what? 48 00:04:28,960 --> 00:04:32,740 Um, the far, far more difficult question. 49 00:04:32,740 --> 00:04:38,850 And frankly, I think the the question. We don't spend enough time thinking about all this space. 50 00:04:38,850 --> 00:04:44,640 Doesn't spend enough time thinking about is the how. I sort of call it the 9 a.m. tomorrow morning question. 51 00:04:44,650 --> 00:04:53,490 And what I think I mean by that is, for the last 2 or 3 decades, the sort of health and climate change space it has existed in the realm of really, 52 00:04:53,490 --> 00:04:59,730 really important, uh, either sort of NGO based, civil society based advocacy, 53 00:05:00,180 --> 00:05:03,870 um, uh, often led by a whole range of different health professionals for, 54 00:05:03,870 --> 00:05:14,580 uh, for our space in, in, in particular, um, or at the sort of public health epidemiology, uh, level and then, uh, things like the Lancet countdown, 55 00:05:14,910 --> 00:05:25,200 go and ask, uh, questions about what a country's economy looks like, what a region's economy looks like over the course of 20, 30, 40 years. 56 00:05:25,980 --> 00:05:32,850 And those are really important questions. But but only if you're trying to convince yourself that this is a good idea. 57 00:05:33,890 --> 00:05:38,510 Once you've convinced yourself that this is a good idea, you no longer need to really. 58 00:05:38,510 --> 00:05:41,690 I mean, other than matters of high strategy and policy. 59 00:05:42,020 --> 00:05:47,360 You no longer need to spend too much time fixated on 2049 or 2044. 60 00:05:47,360 --> 00:05:51,829 You need to spend almost all of your time fixated on what you're going to do tomorrow morning. 61 00:05:51,830 --> 00:05:58,970 And you and you find that the questions and some of the answers that this space had for us, uh, aren't quite fit for purpose. 62 00:06:00,920 --> 00:06:09,559 So the why? It's simple. Um, if you are the NHS, you exist to deliver high quality care for all now and for future generations. 63 00:06:09,560 --> 00:06:13,790 It's been written on the letterhead. It's been written up on the top of a couple of the buildings at least. 64 00:06:13,790 --> 00:06:20,479 Um, when you when you head into work, you simply can't do that unless you respond to climate change, 65 00:06:20,480 --> 00:06:24,320 the National Health Service, and every health care system across the world. 66 00:06:24,320 --> 00:06:27,350 They were designed with a core assumption that the environment was stable. 67 00:06:28,100 --> 00:06:33,319 Turned out, that was a pretty bad assumption. Um, things have started to move far, far quicker. 68 00:06:33,320 --> 00:06:34,190 In the United Kingdom. 69 00:06:34,190 --> 00:06:43,400 You see a doubling of the number of NHS facilities, actually up to about 2.4 times, uh, the number of NHS facilities on high risk floodplains, 70 00:06:43,790 --> 00:06:50,420 um, as a result of, uh, as a result of climate change, you see that by 2030, 2030 is half a second away. 71 00:06:50,900 --> 00:06:59,479 You see a tripling of the, uh, standard deviation of the duration, um, duration for heatwave is what is what tends to matter in this country. 72 00:06:59,480 --> 00:07:07,610 At least we see a tripling of that, um, out heatwaves becoming far, far more fatal, far more dangerous by 2035. 73 00:07:10,830 --> 00:07:13,950 That's the first reason why you might want to respond to that. 74 00:07:13,950 --> 00:07:20,020 It turns out you can't. You can't run a high quality health care system unless you are directly tackling climate change. 75 00:07:20,040 --> 00:07:25,349 The second reason, frankly, is the NHS has had a little bit of experience running at this. 76 00:07:25,350 --> 00:07:30,870 Since 2008, the Climate Change Act, the NHS has started to have a proper institutional. 77 00:07:32,520 --> 00:07:37,919 Almost everywhere you look, almost everything the NHS has done, it turns out it saves a bit of money. 78 00:07:37,920 --> 00:07:42,090 It turns out it's better for patient care. It turns out people love it. 79 00:07:42,930 --> 00:07:49,049 And that's the third reason. When you go out and you ask health care professionals across the country, hey, what do you care about? 80 00:07:49,050 --> 00:07:56,280 And the health profession is tired in this country and frankly, the whole way around the world, when you ask them, hey, what do you care about? 81 00:07:56,700 --> 00:07:59,939 Paradoxically, you might expect them to say, listen, I'm really tired. 82 00:07:59,940 --> 00:08:00,870 I'd quite like a break. 83 00:08:02,020 --> 00:08:09,669 But if you say, hey, are you interested in working for a health care system that is low a carbon that lives up to our own values? 84 00:08:09,670 --> 00:08:13,250 If you say, hey, would you like to be a part of driving that? 85 00:08:13,270 --> 00:08:21,690 The response is thunderous. Nine out of ten, 91% of health care professionals across the United Kingdom want to live up, 86 00:08:21,700 --> 00:08:25,180 uh, want to work for the health care system that is that is responding to net zero. 87 00:08:25,210 --> 00:08:31,090 89% want to take an active personal role in that, in their professional and their personal lives. 88 00:08:32,190 --> 00:08:35,280 You kind of get 90% of healthcare professionals to agree on anything. 89 00:08:35,310 --> 00:08:41,610 You can't get 90% of people to agree on anything. There is remarkable consensus here. 90 00:08:43,430 --> 00:08:50,809 I think sometimes we forget about that. I think sometimes we let ourselves get a little too caught up in some of the guys out there in the media, 91 00:08:50,810 --> 00:08:57,290 sometimes on social media, sometimes just in our heads. It turns out when you look left, look right, look down, look up. 92 00:08:57,560 --> 00:09:04,850 Sitting in an auditorium, pretty much everyone around you. Nine out of ten of those people are on your side and asking, well, what do I do now? 93 00:09:06,670 --> 00:09:14,170 So the what's important as well. I just wanna spend three seconds digging into what is behind the NHS net zero strategy. 94 00:09:14,560 --> 00:09:17,800 Um, two targets 2040 and 2045. 95 00:09:18,680 --> 00:09:22,220 2040 is for the emissions the NHS controls directly. 96 00:09:22,280 --> 00:09:27,440 This is stuff that happens on campus in the sort of four walls of a hospital. 97 00:09:27,590 --> 00:09:32,810 It's stuff that we directly own. So whenever we own a vehicle, we take direct responsibility for that. 98 00:09:33,410 --> 00:09:37,070 2045 is, frankly, for the majority of our emissions profile. 99 00:09:37,310 --> 00:09:41,220 And then that is about the stuff that we don't directly control. 100 00:09:41,240 --> 00:09:49,290 We don't control 100% of the emissions profile of, uh, an apple that goes somewhere from a farm the whole way through truck into, 101 00:09:49,730 --> 00:09:53,270 uh, into our catering system and into into patients or staff. 102 00:09:53,330 --> 00:09:59,300 We don't control the emissions of a factory somewhere else in the world for some of our pharmaceuticals or surgical devices, 103 00:09:59,840 --> 00:10:03,590 but we do exert one [INAUDIBLE] of an influence. We are a price setter. 104 00:10:04,040 --> 00:10:08,779 We, uh, large enough to be able to say, well, we're going to stand up a little bit and we're going to say, 105 00:10:08,780 --> 00:10:15,229 we're going to take responsibility for that decarbonisation process as well, because we know that if we don't, no one else will. 106 00:10:15,230 --> 00:10:21,140 And in fact, we know that when you look around the world, more and more health care systems are saying, yeah, me too. 107 00:10:22,310 --> 00:10:24,470 That's the distinction between those two targets. 108 00:10:24,500 --> 00:10:28,720 One of them is what we feel damn confident we directly control, and the other one is what we're saying. 109 00:10:28,730 --> 00:10:31,820 We know we don't directly control this, but we're going after it anyway. 110 00:10:32,000 --> 00:10:38,690 And we're going to make that commitment ourselves. We think the NHS is big enough, important enough not just for the United Kingdom, 111 00:10:38,690 --> 00:10:43,069 not just to Europe, but frankly, to the world to be able to take that kind of commitment on. 112 00:10:43,070 --> 00:10:46,580 And we'll talk a little bit about some of the international dimensions of that a bit later. 113 00:10:48,140 --> 00:10:55,850 A few other things that are kept quiet. 68 page report that net zero strategy, a few other things that have kept quiet behind those targets. 114 00:10:56,330 --> 00:11:01,110 Number one, there's a word out there that you should never really use in this discussion. 115 00:11:01,130 --> 00:11:05,480 Offsetting negative emissions inherent in. 116 00:11:06,500 --> 00:11:10,160 The phrase net zero. There are positive and negative emissions. 117 00:11:11,060 --> 00:11:20,060 You can't get away from that. What you can do is stop talking about them in 2024 and 2025 and 2026 and 2027. 118 00:11:20,990 --> 00:11:26,420 The approach the NHS takes is that you mitigate as far as you absolutely, possibly can. 119 00:11:26,450 --> 00:11:30,230 You do everything. You look at all of the different carbon sources the whole way across the system. 120 00:11:30,500 --> 00:11:33,950 You tackle every single bucket of emissions you can find. 121 00:11:34,520 --> 00:11:37,970 You go as far as you can and then you stop and you take a break. 122 00:11:38,480 --> 00:11:44,020 It's probably Friday. You go off for a weekend and you come back on Monday, and you keep going a little bit further and a little bit further. 123 00:11:44,030 --> 00:11:47,120 Then you start to talk about the kinds of new things. 124 00:11:47,120 --> 00:11:50,480 You hadn't even dreamed up, the innovation potential of the NHS. 125 00:11:50,690 --> 00:11:55,450 And you mitigate a little bit further. And then out the other side of that. 126 00:11:55,480 --> 00:11:58,930 Only then and only, frankly, in the 2040s. 127 00:11:59,110 --> 00:12:03,130 Are you allowed to even begin to think about talking about things like offsetting. 128 00:12:04,000 --> 00:12:06,430 There's a few reasons for that. Partly it's a distraction. 129 00:12:06,760 --> 00:12:12,820 And partly, frankly, it isn't a particularly effective way of reducing the emissions for something like the NHS. 130 00:12:13,570 --> 00:12:22,180 We did some modelling where we looked at all of the available car parking space, all the Browns land, all the green space that the NHS has available. 131 00:12:22,180 --> 00:12:25,990 And we said, what if we maximised the tree planting potential everywhere? 132 00:12:26,020 --> 00:12:35,440 What if we just just for the fun of it really went wild? You can offset 0.6% of the NSA's annual emissions by doing that. 133 00:12:36,730 --> 00:12:44,920 The NHS doesn't have that many offset, uh, categories available to it, and the ones that it does have, they don't get anywhere close. 134 00:12:46,480 --> 00:12:54,520 So if the NHS is direct emissions, 6% is what we have left in that little offset basket, 8% for our total footprint. 135 00:12:55,060 --> 00:12:56,930 It's important that people are transparent about that. 136 00:12:56,930 --> 00:13:02,570 And anytime someone says when you ask, hey, how much you offsetting attached to your targets, they go, oh, it's quite complex. 137 00:13:02,590 --> 00:13:06,040 You have to think of boundaries and I don't know the line. 138 00:13:07,080 --> 00:13:10,770 People know the answers to these questions, they have buried them somewhere in their report. 139 00:13:10,770 --> 00:13:17,339 It's actually not that complex, to be honest. What is complex is what are you going to do with that little pocket at the end? 140 00:13:17,340 --> 00:13:25,049 And frankly, it's a little black box that the NHS says, well, we think we have got most of the way there against old 1990s baseline. 141 00:13:25,050 --> 00:13:28,350 We've got over 90% of the way down to reducing our emissions. 142 00:13:28,710 --> 00:13:33,900 We feel pretty good about that, that last bit. It's not the part we intend to offset. 143 00:13:33,900 --> 00:13:37,830 In fact, it's the part that we say, hey, we're not really sure how are we going to deal with this, 144 00:13:37,830 --> 00:13:43,710 but we're going to hope and we're going to work towards developing some of those innovations and technology to help us do some of that. 145 00:13:44,610 --> 00:13:49,200 And out the other side, at the very, very end, we will then start to turn our attention to offsetting. 146 00:13:51,250 --> 00:13:55,830 The final thing I would say about those targets is they've actually got two components to them. 147 00:13:55,840 --> 00:14:01,010 They have an 80% reduction. If you look at the emissions trajectory of the NHS, it's not a linear decline. 148 00:14:01,030 --> 00:14:07,880 It goes like this. And then it scrapes along the bottom. That last mile problem is really, really quite challenging. 149 00:14:07,900 --> 00:14:12,150 There are just some really tough parts of the healthcare system to decarbonise. 150 00:14:12,160 --> 00:14:17,050 We are carbon intensive because we are activity energy economically intensive. 151 00:14:18,360 --> 00:14:25,170 That shouldn't stop us from running up the very front, because cumulative emissions matter and because momentum matters as well. 152 00:14:27,970 --> 00:14:29,049 The very, very last thing. 153 00:14:29,050 --> 00:14:42,100 I think when we think about these targets and every now and then people say, hey, Nick, in 2045 versus 2050 versus 2040 versus December 15th, 2044. 154 00:14:43,990 --> 00:14:47,230 Is that good enough? Is that fast enough? Are we going fast enough yet? 155 00:14:47,590 --> 00:14:50,830 The answer invariably, invariably, is no. 156 00:14:51,430 --> 00:14:56,530 Invariably, the answer is we have to go faster. So how do you actually set that target? 157 00:14:56,800 --> 00:15:00,610 Is it based purely on science? No, it's frankly not. 158 00:15:00,880 --> 00:15:07,630 The question you have to ask yourself from a scientific perspective, from a climate perspective, is how fast can you go? 159 00:15:08,170 --> 00:15:09,850 Because you needed to have got there yesterday. 160 00:15:10,210 --> 00:15:17,020 And so the question for the NHS is footprint and its and its reduction strategy is actually one of feasibility. 161 00:15:17,260 --> 00:15:20,409 It's about trying to balance that urgency with making sure that it's credible, 162 00:15:20,410 --> 00:15:25,870 because unless it's credible, you are sure as [INAUDIBLE] not going to be able to mobilise the industry, 163 00:15:26,530 --> 00:15:33,040 the health care system, the health workforce and international partners across the across the world to be able to run at this. 164 00:15:33,040 --> 00:15:41,950 That's what the 2045 and 2040 targets are. They are set right at the 50%, 50, 50 margin of what we think is achievable. 165 00:15:42,520 --> 00:15:45,669 The second we start to feel as though, hey, we're getting on top of this, 166 00:15:45,670 --> 00:15:51,460 we feel pretty good about this and we are starting to feel better about our 80% interim reduction target. 167 00:15:52,810 --> 00:15:56,170 You move that forward. You don't go, okay, I feel good about this. 168 00:15:56,200 --> 00:16:03,690 You say, okay, we ain't fast enough. No. Not yet. The why is simple. 169 00:16:04,560 --> 00:16:11,370 The impacts, the savings, the fact that nothing motivates the health workforce at a time when we could really use a little bit of extra motivation, 170 00:16:12,060 --> 00:16:17,970 like this topic, the what in some ways has a whole bunch of complexity around it, right? 171 00:16:18,000 --> 00:16:23,910 Your your direct and indirect emissions profile, your sort of territorial versus international profile, 172 00:16:23,940 --> 00:16:30,290 what you control, what you directly or indirectly control, your offset capacity, all that stuff is complex. 173 00:16:30,300 --> 00:16:36,190 I would encourage people not to. Spend too much time worrying about that. 174 00:16:36,910 --> 00:16:40,540 I would encourage people to say, is the target difficult? 175 00:16:40,690 --> 00:16:46,860 If the target is difficult, then cool. Then let's just get on with doing stuff at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. 176 00:16:46,870 --> 00:16:50,109 If it's not quite, if we want it to be a little more ambitious. Fine. 177 00:16:50,110 --> 00:16:53,259 But how about we do this stuff today? How about we demonstrate that this stuff is possible? 178 00:16:53,260 --> 00:17:06,000 Positive. Fun. And then go from there. By far the more interesting, more important side of this discussion, I think, is, is the how, um. 179 00:17:08,930 --> 00:17:15,620 You can cut that how? Up into a million different ways you can cut it up into buckets of carbon. 180 00:17:16,440 --> 00:17:21,350 Sort of how the NHS tends to do it. That's something we probably need to apologise to the world for. 181 00:17:21,560 --> 00:17:29,930 We count our carbon, frankly, based on how, uh, the GHG protocols that are divides up emissions flows. 182 00:17:30,230 --> 00:17:33,290 You see us talking about fixed assets, mobile assets. 183 00:17:33,290 --> 00:17:38,060 You see us talking about medical and non-medical supply chain. You see us talking about scope one, two and three. 184 00:17:39,020 --> 00:17:44,480 It's a pretty useless way of counting carbon, and it's a pretty useless way of running, uh, a delivery program, 185 00:17:44,750 --> 00:17:51,330 because no one other than someone that spends way too much of their time looking at this stuff really knows what the [INAUDIBLE] that is. 186 00:17:51,350 --> 00:17:56,320 No one understand that health care system to be structured in terms of fixed and mobile assets? 187 00:17:56,330 --> 00:18:02,000 Um, you know, no doctor working inside a hospital really has any idea about what goes on behind the scenes. 188 00:18:03,440 --> 00:18:11,810 You could cut it up based on the levers you have control of, either at the National, the, uh, trust, or down at the individual clinical level. 189 00:18:11,960 --> 00:18:21,110 We could cut it out by clinical speciality based on how, uh, how a patient might experience, um, a health care system, primary care. 190 00:18:21,320 --> 00:18:24,020 Um, whether they show up in an ambulance, in an emergency department, 191 00:18:24,020 --> 00:18:29,970 whether they are up in an operating theatre or then up into intensive care for the purposes of the. 192 00:18:30,010 --> 00:18:37,129 Today, I was going to suggest we we think of this perhaps less as a health care system problem and more as a political challenge, 193 00:18:37,130 --> 00:18:40,250 more as a organisational challenge. 194 00:18:40,700 --> 00:18:43,790 The NHS, at the end of the day, is the fifth largest organisation in the world, 195 00:18:43,790 --> 00:18:49,030 the largest in Europe, £180 billion of spend and 1.4 million health care professionals. 196 00:18:49,040 --> 00:18:53,570 It's big and that comes with an enormous, enormous strength. 197 00:18:53,780 --> 00:18:59,480 Like I said, we're a price that, um, when the NHS starts to run out of things, the rest of the world goes, oh, wow. 198 00:19:01,070 --> 00:19:09,680 It also brings challenges. It means that spreading best practice from one trust to another, even if they're right next door to each other. 199 00:19:10,070 --> 00:19:15,860 Health spreading. Best practice from one ward to another in the same hospital can be pretty tough. 200 00:19:16,250 --> 00:19:22,270 Um. I think of this mostly as a large scale change management program. 201 00:19:22,990 --> 00:19:30,430 Three things matter if you're going to take some of the literature seriously, which I guess I take medium seriously. 202 00:19:30,880 --> 00:19:39,270 Um, autonomy matters. People need to feel as though they have been given the permission to run at this. 203 00:19:39,280 --> 00:19:44,479 Not just 1 or 2 people, but everyone. Capability and capacity matter. 204 00:19:44,480 --> 00:19:48,740 They need to not just have been given the permission, but they have to have the tools to be able to run at this. 205 00:19:48,740 --> 00:19:51,200 They have to have the time to be able to run at some of this. 206 00:19:52,190 --> 00:19:57,140 And then finally, I think the political science literature would tell you something about interconnectedness. 207 00:19:57,440 --> 00:20:04,400 It's a big word and I'm a relatively simple guy. So, so fun is my is my sort of final piece that I think matters here. 208 00:20:04,580 --> 00:20:11,180 If we are running around like the fun police telling people to recycle into this stripy bin rather than this purple bin, 209 00:20:11,180 --> 00:20:15,440 and telling people that that light actually isn't sustainable as they thought it was. 210 00:20:15,440 --> 00:20:19,070 And whatever I, I promise you, we're going to lose. 211 00:20:19,430 --> 00:20:24,049 I promise you we are going to go too slow. This has to be something that is open to everyone. 212 00:20:24,050 --> 00:20:28,310 It has to be something that is accessible. It has to be something that we can genuinely unlock. 213 00:20:28,520 --> 00:20:33,160 The innovative capacity at 1.4 million. Health professionals. 214 00:20:35,260 --> 00:20:39,459 So taking that in turn, and this is a little bit of how the NHS thinks about this. 215 00:20:39,460 --> 00:20:43,030 We think about autonomy what matters. Well but right to the top. 216 00:20:43,360 --> 00:20:45,760 The Health and Care Act of 2022, 217 00:20:45,820 --> 00:20:53,170 with the support of all sorts of pretty impressive individuals in the House of Lords and the whole way through the Commons, 218 00:20:53,440 --> 00:20:58,209 now says that if you want to be an NHS trust, if you want to be an integrated care system, 219 00:20:58,210 --> 00:21:03,670 if you want to be part of a high quality health care system, you have your own net zero strategy. 220 00:21:04,120 --> 00:21:07,750 You respond to climate change, you take it seriously. You have a board level lead. 221 00:21:10,480 --> 00:21:14,680 It's pretty boring stuff, right? It results in the generation of a lot of plans. 222 00:21:14,860 --> 00:21:19,360 Those plans, if you go and read them, frankly, actually, quite a few of them are pretty impressive. 223 00:21:19,360 --> 00:21:26,589 And what what I guess is behind that is not just one national conversation about what this look like at the national level, 224 00:21:26,590 --> 00:21:33,940 but ideally 212 conversations in every trust, 30, 40, 50 across different intimate integrated care systems and regions. 225 00:21:34,390 --> 00:21:37,480 You start to see that this becomes localised and personalised. 226 00:21:37,480 --> 00:21:41,110 You start to see trusts engaging with their local community, engaging with their patients, 227 00:21:41,110 --> 00:21:45,900 engaging with their staff, saying, hey, what does this mean to you? No one gets it perfect. 228 00:21:46,000 --> 00:21:51,020 No one comprehensively tackled all of this stuff and that is what I love about it. 229 00:21:51,040 --> 00:21:58,600 Each trust gets to take on its own unique personality, its own unique idea of what net zero and low carbon healthcare means to it. 230 00:21:59,920 --> 00:22:01,750 I think we should encourage that diversity. 231 00:22:01,900 --> 00:22:08,410 I think we should be okay with people saying, hey, I'm going to be really, really great at the circular economy within my operating theatre. 232 00:22:08,670 --> 00:22:11,890 Now I'm going to be really, really great at the same thing, but for PPE. 233 00:22:13,070 --> 00:22:17,690 I'm really excited about providing more nutritious, better tasting food to my patients. 234 00:22:18,080 --> 00:22:22,580 I reckon I can do it in a lower carbon way that might actually invest in my local economy, 235 00:22:22,580 --> 00:22:25,840 local farmers, different trusts taken up, that kind of stuff. 236 00:22:25,850 --> 00:22:28,850 I think we should encourage as much as as much as possible. 237 00:22:29,750 --> 00:22:34,190 What we do need to do, though, is as well as provide some of those high level signals. 238 00:22:34,190 --> 00:22:37,729 So you see it in health and care, actually see it in the NHS England planning guidance. 239 00:22:37,730 --> 00:22:41,600 You see it out in the standard contract that goes out to every single part of the system. 240 00:22:42,260 --> 00:22:47,390 You also need to provide just a little bit of guidance, some guardrails on the sides. 241 00:22:48,290 --> 00:22:54,829 I don't want to go too wild. Maybe an example of what this looks like. 242 00:22:54,830 --> 00:23:01,309 And again, you'll hear me refer back to things like procurement. I'm sorry, procurement isn't really a thing that a health care system understands, 243 00:23:01,310 --> 00:23:04,940 but it is a thing that sort of management types in NHS England understand. 244 00:23:05,870 --> 00:23:10,630 There's a net zero supply chain roadmap published a couple of years ago. 245 00:23:10,640 --> 00:23:14,360 It was very long. It was a little bit boring. It had some nice pictures. 246 00:23:14,990 --> 00:23:19,340 Page 3 or 4 though there was one deeply important sentence. 247 00:23:20,150 --> 00:23:26,180 Within the decade, the NHS will no longer purchase from anyone that does not meet or exceed our commitments on net zero. 248 00:23:29,030 --> 00:23:33,440 Initially that was met with a little bit of outrage, frankly, from industry. 249 00:23:33,500 --> 00:23:39,020 They said, what are you talking about? You can't be serious. You guys are only 2.4% of the global pharmaceutical market. 250 00:23:39,020 --> 00:23:44,639 You can't expect us to change just because of you. Then I looked around and they said, oh, really? 251 00:23:44,640 --> 00:23:45,260 Interesting. 252 00:23:45,270 --> 00:23:51,510 Germany said they were quite interested in following and and the United States and that actually they thought this was not a terrible idea. 253 00:23:51,930 --> 00:23:55,230 Even the Kiwis thought it might be. It might be an interesting idea. 254 00:23:57,590 --> 00:24:02,940 What that sort of policy is aiming to do is set something off into the decade, we clarified. 255 00:24:02,960 --> 00:24:08,200 Half a second later. One minute past midnight, April 1st, 2027 is that deadline point. 256 00:24:08,210 --> 00:24:11,990 And then a sequence of milestones going back every year to present day. 257 00:24:13,160 --> 00:24:17,720 Those milestones are just saying, hey, start with a 10% weighting, but you figure out how to do that. 258 00:24:18,780 --> 00:24:20,759 And then they go on to say, well, stop. 259 00:24:20,760 --> 00:24:28,709 We next step build in carbon reduction strategy requirements as a gateway into all tendering for contracts over £5 million, 260 00:24:28,710 --> 00:24:36,750 not for small medium enterprises, for large, large parts of the health industry then starting to slowly expand out. 261 00:24:37,260 --> 00:24:43,470 But that sort of guidance, if you go and read it, it's actually pretty broad brush. 262 00:24:44,070 --> 00:24:50,370 What it's intending to do is say to the 12,000 procurement offices across the country, this is for you to implement. 263 00:24:50,370 --> 00:24:54,299 This is for you to figure out what this looks like in a community nephrology centre. 264 00:24:54,300 --> 00:24:56,820 This is for you to figure out what this looks like in a mental health trust. 265 00:24:57,090 --> 00:25:02,850 We're going to provide the broad parameters of this, but you have the autonomy to go and figure this stuff out for yourself. 266 00:25:02,850 --> 00:25:10,020 And we've got some time to figure it out together. Capability and capacity matter as well. 267 00:25:10,590 --> 00:25:14,370 It's a bit of a myth out there that net zero health kit costs too much money. 268 00:25:14,670 --> 00:25:19,800 Don't ever let let anyone tell you that it is the world's most boring. 269 00:25:20,310 --> 00:25:23,940 Uh, PPE answer to what's the barrier to change? 270 00:25:23,940 --> 00:25:27,900 Someone says bureaucracy. Someone else says money. I, for God's sake. 271 00:25:28,410 --> 00:25:31,860 The NHS thinks it can act on the vast majority of its emissions profile. 272 00:25:31,890 --> 00:25:37,680 We think we can act on 87% of our total emissions profile with no additional capital pressure. 273 00:25:37,950 --> 00:25:41,189 This is principally about the decisions we make and how we deliver care, 274 00:25:41,190 --> 00:25:46,380 and where we get the goods that we deliver that care from about delivering high value care. 275 00:25:46,950 --> 00:25:50,070 There is a capital pressure out the other side and you do need to tackle that. 276 00:25:50,080 --> 00:25:56,399 The good news is that the return on investment attached to that, because broadly we are talking about more efficient health care. 277 00:25:56,400 --> 00:25:59,520 We're talking about delivering health care in more efficient settings. 278 00:26:00,980 --> 00:26:03,560 It has a return on investment of about 3.6 years. 279 00:26:04,040 --> 00:26:10,939 On average, it pays for itself like almost nothing else, but nonetheless, I don't want to brush over it entirely. 280 00:26:10,940 --> 00:26:17,230 So we've had to invest. We've invested over £780 million into low carbon healthcare. 281 00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:24,470 It started to pay for itself. You can see it in the trust that has some pretty significant savings as energy prices spiked a couple of years ago, 282 00:26:24,830 --> 00:26:31,880 but the NHS as a whole, they tripled. They would have gone up by 3.8 fold if we hadn't already started investing their. 283 00:26:33,790 --> 00:26:37,960 You have to make sure that people have some of the training and some of that and a bit of time attached to this. 284 00:26:37,990 --> 00:26:41,379 We see right across the country, uh, Truss starting to say, hey, 285 00:26:41,380 --> 00:26:45,550 why don't we have that emergency department nurse who is really passionate about this? 286 00:26:45,760 --> 00:26:50,800 It's been .2.2 of that time on a Friday or Monday. 287 00:26:51,790 --> 00:26:55,059 Thinking about what this looks like for their emergency department, 288 00:26:55,060 --> 00:26:59,770 thinking about how they can improve the care they're delivering to their patient and staff at their patients, 289 00:26:59,770 --> 00:27:04,540 and starting to run at this, whilst also delivering the high quality clinical care for the rest of the town. 290 00:27:05,500 --> 00:27:10,130 We've had to roll out new training program staff available to, frankly, anyone that's interested. 291 00:27:10,800 --> 00:27:13,090 I know I would say this, but honestly, 292 00:27:13,090 --> 00:27:19,960 maybe the only online two hour training course like fully automated course that I've ever seen that I actually enjoyed. 293 00:27:20,410 --> 00:27:25,050 I like when the team was developing it, I was frankly a little bit sceptical. 294 00:27:25,060 --> 00:27:29,680 We all kind of hate those e-learning module things. I went and looked at it and I had to go and find it. 295 00:27:29,680 --> 00:27:35,920 I was like, this is amazing. And they sort of were like, yeah, what do you. I mean, you know, you you knew we were working on this. 296 00:27:36,080 --> 00:27:40,270 Yeah. I just didn't expect it to be very good. It's actually worth taking a look at. 297 00:27:41,820 --> 00:27:49,379 A day long in-person and hybrid workshop. If you want to take that next step, you want to try to localise that down to some of your personal contexts. 298 00:27:49,380 --> 00:27:54,030 And then for people that are really ready to go forward, there are courses popping up all over the place, 299 00:27:54,360 --> 00:27:57,810 including the one that we're talking about right now here. 300 00:27:58,230 --> 00:28:02,520 Um, starting to say, hey. It's not that complex, 301 00:28:02,520 --> 00:28:08,880 but we're going to have to figure some of this stuff out together with a little bit of shared learning and a bit of community training for the NHS. 302 00:28:08,910 --> 00:28:18,030 We do a six month executive level, board level, uh training programs as well, to try to really put an infusion of energy into this stuff. 303 00:28:19,500 --> 00:28:23,370 The capability and the capacity matters as well as the autonomy. 304 00:28:25,520 --> 00:28:28,340 By far though, and I cannot stress this enough. 305 00:28:28,880 --> 00:28:34,280 If we have to become the guys that run around every single year, when emissions reporting time comes up, 306 00:28:34,280 --> 00:28:38,419 when the annual report comes up and chastise different parts of the system, 307 00:28:38,420 --> 00:28:41,530 different hospitals, different clinicians say, oh God, you haven't done enough. 308 00:28:41,540 --> 00:28:44,810 You didn't recycle enough, you didn't turn your lights off and off. You didn't. Uh. 309 00:28:45,350 --> 00:28:50,750 So boring. And I promise you, everyone is going to turn the other way and go and do something else. 310 00:28:50,990 --> 00:28:59,850 This stuff has got to be. It's got to be fun. I talk sometimes about, uh, a micro grant scheme the NHS ran. 311 00:29:00,460 --> 00:29:04,990 It's called the Healthier Futures Action Fund. I'm not sure who names these things. 312 00:29:05,770 --> 00:29:14,200 Ignore the name. It was a cool scheme. If you were in community, if you were in trust, and you had thought to yourself, man, 313 00:29:14,200 --> 00:29:18,159 I don't know if the world has to be this way, I reckon I've got a cool way of making the service. 314 00:29:18,160 --> 00:29:22,600 We provide our patients more efficient. I reckon I could do better for them, 315 00:29:22,600 --> 00:29:26,889 and I reckon at the same time I might be able to save a bit of resource and might be able to save a little bit of carbon. 316 00:29:26,890 --> 00:29:31,690 I might be able to save the trust quite a bit of money. We had a small amount of money for you. 317 00:29:31,720 --> 00:29:39,320 £5,000. £10,000. Out. We had to close the applications for that process. 318 00:29:40,410 --> 00:29:45,390 I think within 48 hours. We open the thing on Friday by Monday afternoon. 319 00:29:45,450 --> 00:29:49,800 We had expected 50 or 60 applications we'd expected. We put it out for a couple of months. 320 00:29:50,190 --> 00:29:52,590 Um, the health care system has been busy. 321 00:29:53,840 --> 00:30:01,400 We had forgotten that 91% of the NHS want to work for a health care system that is living up to their own values. 322 00:30:02,270 --> 00:30:07,129 We've forgotten how good doctors and nurses and pharmacists are at grabbing with 323 00:30:07,130 --> 00:30:11,900 two hands an opportunity to define the future of their of their clinical practice. 324 00:30:14,040 --> 00:30:17,340 We had 7000 applications come through. 325 00:30:17,520 --> 00:30:21,150 Completely overwhelmed. This great story. 326 00:30:21,160 --> 00:30:29,850 Um, one of the, uh, deputy chief financial officers came to us and said, Nick, I normally hate these sorts of micro grant schemes. 327 00:30:29,860 --> 00:30:31,750 I'm not really sure they add up to much. 328 00:30:33,040 --> 00:30:41,830 But man, my partner is a GP and they had the entire practice over the other night and I have never seen, not in three years. 329 00:30:42,220 --> 00:30:44,799 Their eyes light up so bright, so excited, 330 00:30:44,800 --> 00:30:49,300 dreaming about the different things they could do for their practice and for their patients and for their communities. 331 00:30:49,870 --> 00:30:53,739 They have so many ideas that coming back to our house tomorrow night to keep, keep plodding. 332 00:30:53,740 --> 00:31:01,270 I know the deadline is in a couple of days. They've asked me to say, could they apply for more than one grant because they reckon they've got more? 333 00:31:02,380 --> 00:31:10,030 This has to be about fun. The criteria for that was exclusively you got to do something good for your patients. 334 00:31:10,030 --> 00:31:13,750 You got to do something good for the bottom line, the carbon in the cost of the NHS. 335 00:31:13,930 --> 00:31:17,020 But you have to learn something and you have to have fun. That was all. 336 00:31:19,020 --> 00:31:26,700 You run that sort of stuff, you run the £30 million worth of innovation funding that has started to flood this space from Ukri, 337 00:31:26,700 --> 00:31:31,950 from the MRC, from Nigel, from the NHS, from CBRE, from Alphabet Soup. 338 00:31:33,420 --> 00:31:37,190 You start to get some pretty impressive, pretty exciting ideas. 339 00:31:37,200 --> 00:31:44,400 That's where the NHS is. Uh, zero emission ambulance came from the first in the world, and then three second later the second in the world. 340 00:31:44,580 --> 00:31:55,620 That's where some of the different discovery processes that lead out to more reusable PPE, um, circular, uh, endoscopy, uh, drones getting, 341 00:31:55,950 --> 00:32:03,749 getting chemotherapy medication out to the Isle of Wight faster, cheaper and lower carbon than the alternative, 342 00:32:03,750 --> 00:32:06,990 which I think was a truck, a truck, a car, a hovercraft and truck. 343 00:32:07,350 --> 00:32:13,600 Um. Unless we turn this into something that is fun, unless we turn this into something people want to run at. 344 00:32:14,140 --> 00:32:18,310 I'm not going to get anywhere. Three things matter. 345 00:32:18,340 --> 00:32:24,040 I think autonomy matters. When you have a challenge. This big capability and capacity matter. 346 00:32:24,640 --> 00:32:30,310 Fun matters. I know I say that now. I know when I say fun, I say it with a very severe and grumpy face. 347 00:32:30,310 --> 00:32:35,980 I'm actually quite a fun guy. The fourth and final thing, though, that I think matters. 348 00:32:35,990 --> 00:32:42,520 I reckon we are five seconds away from being there is a sense of inevitability matters. 349 00:32:44,210 --> 00:32:48,560 When the NHS says it's going to get to net zero by 2040, by 2045. 350 00:32:48,560 --> 00:32:53,870 When it says within the decade we will no longer purchase from anyone that does not meet or exceed our commitments on net zero. 351 00:32:53,870 --> 00:32:57,560 When it starts to invest hundreds of millions of pounds into higher quality care, 352 00:32:57,890 --> 00:33:01,430 when it starts to innovate with drones and with zero emission ambulances. 353 00:33:01,670 --> 00:33:06,889 And when you start to see health care systems all around the world Germany, France, Australia, 354 00:33:06,890 --> 00:33:13,340 Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, the United States all start to say, hey, yeah, me too. 355 00:33:13,940 --> 00:33:21,310 That's when this stuff stops becoming just fun and it starts becoming the inevitable future direction of health care. 356 00:33:21,320 --> 00:33:24,350 That's when we start to say, let's figure out the how. 357 00:33:24,590 --> 00:33:27,840 Not that should we? So thank you very much. 358 00:33:27,860 --> 00:33:33,410 I hope that was, uh. All right. I'm sorry I didn't have slides. And I apologise for my Australian accent. 359 00:33:35,580 --> 00:33:39,840 Thank you Nick. The Australian accent is very welcome. Um, and very engaging. 360 00:33:39,990 --> 00:33:43,350 You covered so much ground. Really helpful overview. 361 00:33:43,350 --> 00:33:47,100 And I just love it. That is plain talking. How it is. 362 00:33:47,130 --> 00:33:50,760 Um, cutting through some of the crap that's out there and it's very, very welcome. 363 00:33:50,760 --> 00:33:54,000 So thank you from everyone on the call, particularly our students and tutors. 364 00:33:54,240 --> 00:33:57,670 Thank you. Thanks, guys. Thanks anyway. 365 00:33:57,670 --> 00:33:59,800 Thanks, Sarah. That's really, really cool so much.