Allied Healthcare Professionals
Everyone has a role to play
Why Should Healthcare Professionals Talk About Climate Change?
The climate crisis is a health crisis. Whether its because of heatwaves, floods, storms or pollution, every human organ and body system is affected by climate change.
Key examples of how climate change affects health include:
• Increased admissions to hospital due to extreme weather conditions, food scarcity and exacerbations of illnesses, increasing the pressure and workload.
• Exacerbation of mental health conditions as a result of disruption to lives from climate change events.
• Heatwaves, made more likely by climate change, are associated with increases in deaths and complications of pre-existing health conditions
How is Healthcare Affecting Climate Change?
Everything we do in healthcare has an environmental impact. As the third largest clinical workforce in UK healthcare, AHPs have a crucial role to play in reducing the environmental impact of healthcare. Some key examples include:
• PPE – Gloves are one of the most common single-use plastic items in healthcare, the materials used to make them derive from oil. Only need to be used for contact with blood; other bodily fluids; harmful medications/substances; or broken skin.
• Waste and single use plastic – healthcare is a major producer of waste with high levels of single use plastic in every department.
• Disposal of waste – Many items are not recyclable and/or have bodily fluids on them. Therefore healthcare materials are often binned inefficiently leading to less than half of healthcare materials being recycled, the rest being incinerated or equivalent.
Discussion Ideas
There are so many topics in the world of climate change that form great discussions. The list is endless but here are a few ideas:
- Sustainable Quality Improvement - Changes that you can make at work to reduce waste and improve care will have positive effects on the environment
- Eating less meat - this is one of the easiest changes we can make to reduce our environmental impacts. Just one or two meat free days a week can reduce the carbon footprint of your food by 20%. Cutting out beef altogether can reduce it by 30%.
- Active Travel - Walking and cycling (even by E-bikes) is much better for your health and the planet than driving.
- Nature - This might involve visiting local nature reserves, watching nature documentaries, installing bird and bug houses in your garden, or even taking part in No-Mow May: a simple activity of not mowing your lawn for the month of May and allowing wildflowers to grow through the grass
The conversation is the most important thing as it will spark ideas!
Highest Impact Actions for AHPs
AHPs are positioned well to address the actions needed, be that reducing the impact of healthcare on climate change or educating themselves and patients on how to manage conditions that will be on rise due to climate change.
• STOP before putting on PPE such as aprons and gloves. Do you need to wear it or will hand hygiene be enough? Gloves are not necessary for every contact and may reduce your hand hygiene too. Check out the video from the Royal College of Nursing below.
• Waste reduction. Minimise how much of each item is used through reusing where possible i.e. same patient same item. Sterilise when possible e.g. breast pumping supplies and bottles, drinking cups for patients
• Correct disposal of unavoidable waste. Implement updated waste disposal policies onto wards including recycling, clinical waste and regular waste.
The Royal College of Nursing has produced an informative video on the appropriate use of gloves:
For More Information
Get involved with the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare's AHP Sustainability Network for more ideas and networking