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THE HSE HAS no climate action plan in place at the moment, but an infrastructure report set to be released in March will pave the way for a wider climate strategy.
The health service has the highest greenhouse gas emissions of any public body. Under the 2021 Climate Action Plan, large public sector organisations must create climate action roadmaps by the end of this year.
The HSE had a sustainability strategy in place from 2017-2019 but this was never replaced. A wide-ranging HSE climate action plan will be released later this year.
Reducing emissions from infrastructure is one of the key priorities for the HSE’s decarbonisation plans at the moment, according to the health service’s national lead for capital and estates on climate action and sustainability Peter Smyth.
The HSE previously had a National Health Sustainability Office, but this was merged into a wider ranging Climate Action and Sustainability Unit last year. This has not yet been outlined on the heath service’s website.
“Our approach is that the first thing we have to do is deal with the obligations we have and the infrastructural obligations we have,” Smyth told The Journal.
“If you look at the NHS, their initial approach kind of was very similar to this and there’s an awful lot of international organisations that say that what you do first is you deal with your buildings.”
The UK’s health service the NHS has pledged to reach net-zero on its direct emissions by 2040.
Around 130 buildings out of 2,594 in total account for roughly three-quarters of the HSE’s energy and emissions. The most emitting buildings include larger acute hospitals and residential care facilities.
Smyth said a HSE infrastructure decarbonisation strategy and implementation plan has been drafted and will be published in March this year.
This will form “part of a broader HSE climate action plan which will be developed” later in 2022.
“And that broader plan will include the approach to supply chain and medicines and pharmaceuticals. That’s not developed yet, but that’s the process that’s being initiated,” Smyth said.
A programme is currently underway to figure out how to make existing HSE infrastructure more energy efficient.
For this, the HSE chose ten representative sites to examine around the country – four acute hospital settings, four older person units, one primary care and one office building.
A design team will assess the performance of these ten sites and decide how they can reduce emissions in line with targets while being “cost optimal”.
“In some cases, some of these very old buildings, it wouldn’t make sense to spend an amount of money on them to make them compliant whereas it would be cheaper to actually go and build new,” Smyth said.
“We can only really make big decisions then about the future once we have the facts, because up until that it’s peoples’ best guesses and there’s too many variables in it really to make good decisions without that really good information.”
The findings of this exercise will then be applied to the rest of the HSE’s buildings.
“There’s a new way of thinking from the point of view of construction. That is, carbon is so valuable you can never afford to throw anything away or discard something that you’ve expended carbon in constructing in the first place,” Smyth added.
He said the HSE’s “energy efficient design approach” for new projects, first introduced a few years ago, means that “when you’re designing the building, you’re designing it with energy efficiency and now carbon emissions as one of the key drivers”.
“We have confidence that when we’ve actually challenged the design at the very earliest stage that we’re going to get a building that’s going to perform without having to add a load of mechanical electric ventilation,” Smyth said.
However, issues remain with the HSE buildings already in use.
“We spent close to €8 million last year, and we’ll spend at least that in 2022, on the works that are being progressed in the likes of improved insulation, replacing glazing, replacing oil or gas boilers with heat pumps, PV installations [solar panels],” he said.
‘We need a comprehensive strategy’
Dr Ana Rakovac, Consultant Chemical Pathologist at Tallaght University Hospital, said she is “delighted” there is a HSE climate plan in the works.
Dr Rakovac is the chair of the sustainable healthcare group in the Irish Doctors for the Environment, an NGO of healthcare workers focused on the health impacts of climate change.
“We would like to see clearer targets, clearer actions and clearer ways of measuring the outcome of those actions,” she told The Journal.
“We need a comprehensive strategy – a comprehensive, system-wide umbrella document and a commitment.”
She criticised that there is currently “not that much” focus on waste and recycling measures and said there needs to be a “consistent sustainability effort” in all aspects of the health service.
“The system approach is not there,” she said, despite some individual facilities having green groups and committees.
The World Health Organization recently warned that the vast amount of waste produced in tackling the Covid-19 pandemic posed a threat to human and environmental health.
The tens of thousands of tonnes of extra medical waste had put a huge strain on healthcare waste management systems, the WHO said in a report.
“The main thing healthcare needs to realise, both in Ireland and globally, is that we are part of the problem,” Dr Rakovac said, adding that “everybody needs to start thinking about it”
“We are doing this as activists in our free time. This should be somebody’s job.
“The last two years showed us that when the politicians understand the urgency of something, a lot of things can be done. Vaccine production can be prioritised. Money can be put where our mouths are – and that’s what needs to happen with this.
We need a concerted effort to see this at the emergency that it is.
Meeting climate targets
Smyth said the HSE knows “what we’re going to have to do to meet” climate targets and this will be set out in greater detail in the climate action plan later this year.
The government’s Climate Action Plan sets out that the public sector will have to reduce emissions by 51% by 2030, in line with the overall requirement for emissions reductions in Ireland.
Public sector buildings accounted for 1.4% of Ireland’s overall greenhouse gas emissions in 2018.
Emissions from public sector buildings reduced by 12.4% between 2005 and 2011 but increased again by around the same amount between 2011 and 2018.
A new system to monitor and report emissions from the public sector is set to be completed by the end of this year.
The 2021 Climate Action Plan also said that a review will be carried out to assess the “potential” to widen the scope of emissions captured in the public sector target to include indirect Scope 3 emissions.
These refer to emissions from activities such as business travel and commuting. Most organisations do not systematically record this information.
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How about making a serious attempt at our chronic overcrowding and disgraceful waiting times for appointments.
Public sector responsible for 1.4% of greenhouse gasses and 99.4% of Public let down and failures
@Mark Dawson: I see from your profile that you’re formally of the public sector yourself, how many public let downs and failures have you contributed to so?
@Mark Dawson: 72% of stats made up on the spot. :-)
@D. Memery: what public sector do you refer to? And I be happy to explain
@D. Memery: my post references the powers that be and not meant to be interepted as the average worker class , who has no input in policy or the actions they instructed to carry out, it’s government level and senior management I reference
@Mark Dawson: you profile appears to show you formally served in the armed forces, and I believe your profile picture is from a veterans association. Whilst such service is without a doubt to be commended, are the armed forces not in fact part of the public service which you highlight as being responsible for a significant level of let-down? Based upon your service, can you enlighten us upon how the public service, in your experience, managed to achieve such a level?
Headline show be “No HSE plan in place”
@Jules: Should be
Anaesthesia gases account for 4% of global warming. They generally consist of halogenated hydrocarbon structures, with long atmospheric half-lives. Presently, these gases are vented from the operating room and simply released on the roof of the hospital – direct to the atmosphere – like effluent into a stream.
However, there are multiple alternatives; most simply recycling – a Canadian firm has been recycling these vapours for almost 10 years now, with approx. 50% of hospitals there utilising the system. There are also operator dependent techniques which can reduce usage by up to 90% on surgeries lasting more than 1 hour – which are not being utilised.
“Anaesthesia gases account for 4% of global warming”
It does?, pity there is no scientific evidence to support this claim.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/02/uah-global-temperature-update-for-january-2022-0-03-deg-c/
@John Kennedy: There is ample evidence in multiple medical and scientific journals. A former NASA scientist who spreads misinformation cannot change facts. I believe he is also of the Flat Earth society – strange that he would work for NASA – but perhaps not that they agreed to part ways.
@John Kennedy: It interests me that despite having been advised of relevant science to gain your own insight – you continue to be so short-sighted. You can lead a horse to water…
@Juniper: From tthe University of Alabama Huntsville website
“Dr. John R. Christy is the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville where he began studying global climate issues in 1987. Since November 2000 he has been Alabama’s State Climatologist. In 1989 Dr. Roy W. Spencer (then a NASA/Marshall scientist and now a Principal Research Scientist at UAH) and Christy developed a global temperature data set from microwave data observed from satellites beginning in 1979. For this achievement, the Spencer-Christy team was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991. In 1996, they were selected to receive a Special Award by the American Meteorological Society “for developing a global, precise record of earth’s temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate.” In January 2002 Christy was inducted as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.”
Flat earth society my ar$E
@John Kennedy: your original citation was of Sr Roy Spencer. Make up your mind… you mindless m0r0n
Maybe cut management salaries so they can only afford smaller, more fuel-efficient cars and maybe cut down on management in general so there are fewer people driving to hospital and back every day?
Focussing on how to improve on his €400,000 A year pay.
Will Paul Reid be the last man in Ireland to take off his face nappy?
Well articulated Dr Rakovac. We all need to accept that this is a problem of our creation and that it is up to each one of us to sort it out.
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