Paving the way for sustainability
Teams at The Royal London (RLH) and Mile End Hospitals are paving the way for sustainability across the Trust.
In an effort to become more environmentally sustainable, the Tower Hamlets Community Neuro team at Mile End and Endoscopy team at the RLH entered projects into the Green Ward Competition.
The 12 week competition, run by the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare, asked staff to think of new and innovative ways to reduce waste and the carbon footprint within their own clinical areas. Dr Olivia Bush from the Centre worked directly with the teams to develop, run and measure their sustainability projects.
While the teams didn’t win the prize of £150, the Tower Hamlets Community Neuro team were highly commended.
Saving more than just time
The Tower Hamlets Community Neuro team set out to prove that an iPad could improve the amount of time and resource currently being used to travel from home visits with patients back to their office to write notes.
Holly Corlett, Lily Smythe and Mairead Espinoza took a random week in their diaries and measured how much time they spent travelling, how they were travelling and how much paper they were using. They found that on a typical week, they would:
- Spend 4.3 – 9.3% of their day travelling back to base to write notes (34 – 37.7% of their total travel for the day)
- Take anywhere between 60 minutes and 48 hours to write up notes from home visits
- Use 41.6 sheets of paper between them
Based on the travel and paper estimates and existing research they used data calculation spreadsheets to show that iPads would:
- Save £1228 over five years
- Reduce carbon emissions by 235 kgCO2e (over 117 trees!)
- Result in more contemporaneous note writing and therefore more accurate and up to date records
- Increase the number of patients who can be seen due to time saved from reduced travel
Community Neuro plans to use this data to build a case to look for further funding opportunities and hope to eventually secure mobile devices across their team.
Lily Smythe, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist said: “The conversation about mobile is ongoing with all community teams, trust-wide and across the NHS. If we can improve our practices and become more efficient, we need to do that.”
Cutting down on doubling up
Emma Rothwell and members of the endoscopy admin team at the RLH set up a project to eliminate duplicate letters sent to GP surgeries.
At the start of the competition all endoscopy reports were being printed and mailed to GPs, despite reports for patients with a GP in Tower Hamlets being sent electronically. This duplication was identified as an area of waste in the department.
As a baseline, the reception team logged the amount of time spent posting out all the paper reports that were printed each day over a nine-day period. Data was collected on the number of local reports for Tower Hamlets GPs and the number for out of the local area GPs (that still needed to be sent by post). Once this data had been collected, the nursing team were asked to stop printing all local reports, as the reception team would be accessing the reports digitally. Data collection was then repeated.
Of a total of 340 reports generated, 153 local reports were printed and posted unnecessarily over nine days, an average of 17 per day. After the change was introduced zero local reports were printed unnecessarily. Other benefits seen by the project were:
- Reduction of carbon emissions by 1477kg CO2e
- Reduction in low value work (printing, enveloping reports) for team and frustration of purposeless duplication of work; built team’s confidence in ability to and benefit of making changes in working practices.
- Saving of £3,357 in resources
Moving forward the team plans to have the new system embedded in the team to ensure a lasting change.
Has your team introduced any green initiatives? Let us know by commenting below!