Royal College of Nursing activists were heading home to “green” their wards after training sessions at the Joint Reps conference last week.
It was great to be invited along to the Joint Representatives’ conference, where the RCN’s most active members were meeting up together. Despite a festive conference dinner the night before, the activists (a mixture of RCN Stewards, Safety Reps and Learning Reps) were soon unpacking sustainability issues from their workplaces and coming up with ideas for tackling them.
[img_assist|nid=482|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=300|height=210]Many of the ideas could be grouped under travel, energy and waste disposal, and a number of ideas used “lean thinking” to design out wasteful processes. For example, a switch from paper to electronic referrals in one unit, and an ambitious proposal for centralised clinical stores connected up to a pod system – to avoid local stockpiling.
Lots of people were shocked to learn about the huge carbon footprint of pharmaceuticals and gave many examples where drugs are thrown away when patients are admitted to hospital or prescriptions are changed. One chemotherapy nurse reported how the hospital pharmacy refused to collect back expensive unused chemotherapy vials which had not been needed on the ward – counting these up from a single day came to over £300 worth of medications.
In the sessions, we went through the SAP (Sustainable Action Planning) website and tried out some of the tools – coming up with some perceptive new euphemisms for waste! “hospital-acquired infection”, “bulk packaging”, “local stock”, “stealing’… The participants thought about how they could use the SAP programme with their colleagues, and several participants decided to put it on the next management agenda.
“Tell me one thing have you learned today?” I asked. “The 10:10 Ward Checklist” said one activist. “This is all about local action – I hadn't realised that before”.
RCN activists are clearly the ideal people to lead on sustainable healthcare in the NHS!
[img_assist|nid=483|title=Frances with RCN Safety Rep, Katrina Denton|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=300|height=208]
If you are an RCN member who would like to get involved in sustainable healthcare, please contact Kim Sunley at the RCN HQ.
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