“Find your allies – the people who can connect you to the right stakeholders,” is the advice to innovators from Anna Lisa Mills, sustainability manager at Newcastle Hospitals and founder of SmartCarbon, a digital platform that helps organisations measure and reduce their carbon footprints. “Since joining the NHS five years ago, I haven’t come across as many barriers as you’d expect,” she says. “Okay, the bureaucracy’s a pain, but the buy-in to sustainability is there.”
A chartered environmentalist and lecturer at Northumbria University, Mills started the SmartCarbon business with support from the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, which provided funding for a pilot with the Newcastle trust.
SmartCarbon developed a bespoke version of the platform, which included hospital-specific metrics like anaesthetic gases. It’s now used by 17 NHS trusts, as well as bakery chain Greggs, Newcastle United football club, Surrey county cricket club and Durham Cathedral. Mills’s work with Newcastle Hospitals led to her joining the trust – after “completing lots of conflict of interest paperwork”, she says – working three days a week while still serving as a director of SmartCarbon.
Decarbonising the supply chain is “the biggest sustainability challenge we face in the NHS”, Mills explains. Instead of simply estimating them, Newcastle now supports suppliers to measure their own emissions, which are fed through to the trust’s ‘footprint plus’ data.
Mills would like to see the ten year plan “treat the climate emergency as a health emergency”. Pointing out that air pollution is now the fourth biggest killer in the UK, she says: “It’s not a nice-to-have bolt-on, it’s core to human health.”
In a remarkable coup for the NHS, Alder Hey Hospital’s Kate Warriner has been voted the UK’s top digital chief by IT industry leaders. She tells Craig Ryan about what made the Liverpool kids’ hospital a technology powerhouse and why innovation and transformation is more about human beings than machines.
Managing AI responsibly will be one of the biggest challenges facing NHS managers in the coming decade. Governments are keen to ride the latest technological wave, but trust in AI varies wildly and big questions about governance and regulation remain unanswered, writes Craig Ryan.
The threat of potentially catastrophic cyber attacks on the NHS has increased “really dramatically” in recent weeks and is still “accelerating”, NHS England chief Sir Jim Mackey has said. His warning came just weeks after NHSE’s board was warned by its own digital experts that NHS job cuts posed an “unmitigated” risk to cybersecurity.
MiP says regulation alone will not improve the NHS culture around raising and acting on concerns, following the findings of the Thirlwall Inquiry into the Lucy Letby case.
TUC Congress has backed a motion calling for an evidence-based and fully resourced plan for NHS management, with unions warning that cutting management capacity risks shifting essential work onto clinical teams.
The Scottish Government has announced plans to radically restructure the NHS, replacing Scotland’s 14 territorial health boards with two new ‘Strategic Health Boards’ covering the west and east of the country.
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