Meet the Sustainability Team Our Sustainability Team focuses on two key areas - reducing LUHFT’s carbon footprint and the Trust’s role as an anchor institution, which is how we positively contribute to our community.
Briefly, what does your team do? We love that our team can get involved in a variety of projects and work with teams from all areas. We manage Trust energy use and are also working to reduce our energy use, including reducing carbon emissions in water use, waste, our fleet vehicles, anaesthetic gases and metered dose inhalers. Our team also ensures that as an anchor institution LUHFT is working within the local community to have a positive impact. This includes supporting internship programmes, reducing singleuse plastics and looking at social value requirements when we procure goods and services. This also includes creating good use of our outdoor spaces within the Trust. We now have a nature recovery ranger and support officer who work with local community groups, delivering projects to provide biodiversity benefits and improve the green spaces for staff, patients and the community. 8 | LUHFT Life
Another part of our role is healing arts, which uses the arts to improve the patient and staff experience whilst in our hospitals.
What key projects are you working on at the moment? We’re working with procurement colleagues to influence our suppliers, to ensure that they are embedding environmental and social value benefits into their operations. This is how we can have the biggest impact. We are also working with Smart Carbon to accurately refine our carbon footprint. This will help us understand the true environmental impact the Trust is having, identify ‘carbon hotspots’ and properly measure the benefits our sustainability projects are having.
What have been some team highlights/ achievements? It was a big achievement launching the new LUHFT Sustainability Strategy. It sets out our three-year plan with ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions and to improve how we operate responsibly within our community. The creation of the new community garden and outdoor gym area at
Broadgreen is also a highlight for the team. It has given staff and patients access to good quality green space, which is so important for our mental wellbeing.
This year the team secured a £500,000 Government grant to make energy improvements to three buildings at Aintree. It will be used to install insulation, LED lights, solar panels and renewable energy heat pumps to replace gas boilers and more.
Looking ahead, what can colleagues expect to see next from the team? We are hosting an event on Tuesday 5 April from 10am to 4pm at Broadgreen. There will Dr Bike giving free bike maintenance, wellbeing activities and live arts performances. Everyone is welcome. There will be similar events at Aintree and the Royal later this year.
Get in touch •
Email: sustainability@ liverpoolft.nhs.uk
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Join LUHFT Sustainability Network on Microsoft Teams
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Twitter: @GreenerLUHFT
