Green Primary Care
Net Zero Primary Care can improve health, reduce health inequalities and reduce the carbon footprint across the entire ICS health and care system.
Primary care delivers 90% of patient healthcare contacts and most of its carbon footprint is in clinical care. Environmentally sustainable primary care therefore has the potential to improve healthcare and reduce the carbon footprint across the entire ICS health and care system.
What is sustainable healthcare?
Environmentally sustainable healthcare can be achieved either through reducing the need for healthcare or improving the efficiency of healthcare.
The diagram of the principles of sustainable healthcare from the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare, illustrates how this framework can improve population health, reduce health inequalities, reduce workload and costs.
The primary care carbon footprint
Primary care is responsible for approximately 23% of the NHS carbon footprint. The majority of which comes from prescribing and clinical work, as shown in the image opposite by Dr Matt Sawyer of SEE Sustainability.
The clinical carbon footprint is largely from prescribing of medicines (57%) and Inhalers (43%). The non-clinical carbon footprint consists of patient and staff travel (41%), followed by energy use (29%) and business services (22%) (figure 3).
You can view the full report on the Carbon Footprint of GP Practices in Humber and North Yorkshire and quickly calculate your practices non-clinical carbon footprint here.
Better and Greener Asthma Care
We can improve asthma outcomes and reduce our carbon footprint from metered dose inhalers at the same time! Learn more here.
Humber and North Yorkshire ICB have published new asthma guidance and a have Medicines Management Enhanced service to support this work. Learn more here on the resources available to support you do this work.
Resources and Network for healthcare professionals
Greener Practice York & North Yorkshire is a network of healthcare professionals across York and North Yorkshire. They have a fabulous website full of resources. The network can support you to spread ideas for sustainable healthcare to your teams, patients, and communities, with the aim of reducing the carbon footprint of our local NHS and the wider community.
Members are local people working in Primary Care, who have a huge range of experience and a great enthusiasm to maximise the health and wellbeing of patients and teams in a way that is good for patients and good for the planet.
Click here to browse and download free resources, and join the network.
The Greener Practice national website also offers a national hub of information and resources on greener general practice.
Decarbonisation Guides for GP Practices
Several guides have been created to enable them GPs to start on their decarbonisation journey for non-clinical carbon. These training guides are provided free for all GPs to use. You can view the full guide, or click on the images of the individual guides to view.
