The NHS needs to be a low carbon, sustainable healthcare provider and face the new challenge of treating medical problems arising from climate change, the leaders of a new initiative have said.
An training programme announced on Monday aims to educate future doctors on how to reduce carbon emissions and waste in the NHS - currently the largest public sector emitter of carbon. The government has already set the service a drastic Carbon Reduction Strategy, which requires it to attain an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050.
“To meet this massive reduction, a complete overhaul of how healthcare is provided is necessary”, said Stefi Barna of University of East Anglia's medical team, the group spearheading the training project.
Updating heating systems, increasing recycling, and using less electricity will all help, but more broadly, doctors will also be aiming to prevent lifestyle diseases. For example, they will be seeking to tackle obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, which are increasingly understood to result from ‘obesogenic’ built environments and food production systems.
Medical journal The Lancet proclaimed climate change "the biggest global health threat of the 21st century" and it is already estimated to cause 100,000 deaths each year internationally. The NHS is accordingly attempting to head off future problems that this might cause in Britain.
The NHS is planning to look at a wide range of indirect effects from climate change: from direct problems such as heatstroke and respiratory problems from atmospheric pollution, to indirect effects including food-price rises from drought, which could hit the nutritional standards of low-income families. There are also fears that the country's population density could soar as people move to the UK from areas in the EU that have become uninhabitable.
The NHS says it is seeking to tackle all of these predicted problems by creating contingency plans as early as possible.