SCFT named a 2022 Climate Champion

We are pleased to announce that we have been named a 2022 Climate Champion by Health Care Without Harm. As a participant in the Health Care Climate Challenge, we are committed to reducing health care’s own carbon footprint, preparing for the impacts of extreme weather and the shifting burden of disease, educating staff and the public whilst promoting policies to protect public health from climate change. 

This directly supports our Care Without Carbon programme, set out in our Green Plan which details how we will achieve Net Zero Carbon by 2040 in line with NHS England requirements.

In this year’s Health Care Climate Challenge awards, we received recognition for our efforts across the organisation to tackle our carbon emissions with the following awards:

• Greenhouse Gas Reduction (Energy)- Gold
• Renewable Energy- Gold
• Climate Leadership- Silver

An example of our work to achieve this includes our Fleet Decarbonisation programme. The programme focuses on replacing fleet with electric or alternative (low carbon) fuel on a rolling basis as leases for existing vehicles come to an end. To date, we have upgraded our operational fleet to include 189 alternative fuel vehicles. We have also been working to decarbonise energy use in our healthcare building. This has been in a range of ways from good energy management and investment in low carbon technologies (e.g., our proposed heat pumps at Chailey) to the installation of solar panels at two key sites and purchasing 100% renewable electricity.

We are also working with other Trusts in our region and at ICS level to share our expertise in sustainable healthcare as we all work towards Net Zero Carbon.

We are honoured to receive these awards and to be a part of a global community of health care institutions on every continent leading the transformation to climate-smart health care because a healthy climate means healthier people. This is just the beginning, with projects as such as glove use reduction, growing digital care services, increasing EV charging infrastructure and heat decarbonisation across key sites all in the pipeline. We are also developing a new staff engagement programme to bring everyone with us on this journey to Net Zero Carbon.

We look forward to the work that lays ahead as we strive to protect the future health of our community, environment and planet.