Climate Health Council

British Medical Journal: http://www.bmj.com

Centre for Sustainable Healthcare: http://sustainablehealthcare.org.uk

The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare was born in 2011. Working in the field of healthcare, this small charity wants people to realise that their well-being is closely related to the environment sustainability. The organisation was formerly known as the Campaign for Greener Healthcare and part of Knowledge into Action.

Centre for Sustainable Healthcare advocates a prudent use of natural resources for the public benefitand they aim to transform health services, among others, towards a sustainable future. They want sustainability to be a management prioritysupposing thatit is possible to change things by acting now.

How they do it?

The CSH favours fieldwork and targeted actions for more efficiency. Their work is focused on 3 main areas :

•  Engagement : from health professionals and patients, but also the wider community, in order to raise awareness of the importance of climate change on health
• Knowledge sharing: by makingthe information more accessible and better organized for those who want it. They created the SHEBA (Sustainable Health Evidence Base for Action) which brings together a wealth of information : http://www.sustainabilityforhealth.org/
• Transformation: Mostly working with different bodies of the NHS, developing targeted programs adapted to certain clinical specialties like nephrology.

Their website also provides a lot of information about the different actions they undertake, news and events: http://sustainablehealthcare.org.uk/

Who?

The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare is composed of a team of around fifteen people, of which about half are employed and half are volunteers.They have skills in both, environment and health allowing them to take a multidisciplinary approach. They work closely with some partners, both within and outside the NHS, working on health, environment or sustainability.

Forthcoming projects

The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare is working on a range of projects, including:

• The launch of a Green Respiratory Medicine programme, and continuation of the Green Nephrology programme
• TheSustainable Hospital programme, which aims to measure progress in cutting carbon emissions using predefined measures to classify hospitals and a reward green hospitals
• The “NHS Forest” program which consists in plantingone tree per employee of the NHS (about 1.3 million), in order tooffset carbon dioxide emissions and increase the awareness of NHS employees of their impact and their environment
• Ongoing involvement in 1010 Health