Policy, Politics and Sustainable Health Care: a Talk From Chris Gormley, NHS Chief Sustainability Officer
1 hours and 24 minutes ago
In this blog, we share reflections from Professor Sara Shaw and Dr Amy Booth who run the Sustainable Health Care Module of the MSc in Translational Health Sciences programme. Last week the course was honoured to host Chris Gormley, Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) of the NHS, as a guest speaker for a critical, and nuanced conversation about how to bring about change in complex political and economic environments.
About the authors: Sara Shaw is Professor of Health Policy & Practice in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, and leads the Sustainable Health Care course with Dr Amy Booth, Research Fellow in Sustainable Medicines in the Green Healthcare Hub. They are both committed to making health care more environmentally sustainable, in the UK and globally, through research, scholarship and teaching. They set up the Sustainable Health Care course 3 years ago, realising there was very little to support learning and action in this field – the course has gone from strength to strength, engaging students from multiple countries and settings, and inspiring action for sustainability.
When you put the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) of the NHS in a room with Oxford students from all around the world, the conversation is bound to be interesting. The MSc in Translational Health Sciences, hosted by Oxford Lifelong Learning, has been running a pioneering module and short course on Sustainable Health Care, now in its third year. Health systems contribute 4-5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, alongside generating large quantities of medical waste, releasing pharmaceuticals into the environment, consuming vast amounts of water and energy, and impacting biodiversity. This course is run by Professor Sara Shaw and Dr Amy Booth and teaches students about the interconnections between health and the environment, the environmental impact of health care, and how we can bring about change towards more sustainable health systems.
This year, the course was honoured to host Chris Gormley, CSO of the NHS, as the guest speaker. Having spent 12 years working in government on climate and energy policy, Chris focused on the NHS from 2016. After a stint as NHS Director of Policy, he is now responsible as CSO for delivering a world-class net zero health service. Chris was then extremely well placed to discuss the politics and policymaking that underpin large-scale shifts towards net zero health care.
The week before his talk, students from 10 different countries had spent an intensive week covering a variety of sustainable healthcare topics taught by lecturers from around the world – from carbon modelling to sustainable infrastructure, digital technologies, mapping care pathways, the trade-offs and co-benefits of sustainability, to waste, supply chains, and bringing about change. Chris’s talk was an ideal way to end the course: with a fantastic, critical, and nuanced conversation about how to bring about change in complex political and economic environments. Students from the Health Organisations and Policy module of the MSc programme joined for the session, encouraging us to explore ways in which policy and politics shape, enable and potentially constrain sustainable health care.
Current student, Clé Holly from the Health Organisations & Policy module, shared:
“It was fascinating to see how thoughtfully resources are allocated within such a complex system – and to discuss the nimble approach that Chris and his team take to shepherd meaningful innovation from concept to policy to practice, while still championing high-quality patient care.”
Chris began by commenting on the evolution of legislation within the NHS and how climate change and sustainability came to be included within it. He reflected on the NHS’s bold statement in being the first health system to commit to net zero in 2020 – a commitment that almost 100 other countries have since followed. He spoke about progress – phasing out desflurane (an anaesthetic agent with greater environmental impacts than other, readily available alternatives), switching to low-carbon inhalers, transitioning to an electric ambulance fleet, and rolling out the NHS Supplier Roadmap, which demands sustainability action from thousands of suppliers across NHS supply chains. But he also reflected on the challenges – a complicated political environment with fluctuating commitment to sustainability, a mismatch between policy timelines and the urgency of climate change, the financial costs of sustainable action, and navigating misinformation and damaging media clickbait.
Chriss Tuyishime, current student on the Sustainable Health Care (SHC) module, commented:
“Going into the SHC module, I was sceptical about our society’s ability to transition toward more sustainable systems. Coming out of it, I feel more hopeful, having learned about the tireless, cross-sector efforts underway to drive this transformation. Hearing from Chris about his team’s ambitious vision for a Greener NHS, and the pragmatic creativity involved in realising it, made that progress feel tangible. It’s been a privilege to learn so much and explore transferable insights between the sector-leading sustainability work in the UK and my home country, Rwanda!”
Our students asked probing questions about how lessons from the NHS can be adapted to their own countries – often facing even greater political resistance and climate denial. They also explored how to avoid unintended consequences, communicate sustainability in a rapidly changing world, and motivate other, often more polluting, industries to act. A key takeaway was the relational nature of policymaking – the conversations on trains or in elevators with people who have the power and impetus to bring about change. This does not deny the importance of ground-level action and bottom-up momentum. Health systems, healthcare providers and patients all have an important narrative to tell about climate change: the climate crisis is a health crisis. If we do not act now, the health and financial costs of climate change will only worsen.
It is with hope, then, that passionate individuals like Chris Gormley, his team, the multitude of clinicians on the ground, researchers and students, alongside wider public voices are taking a stance. The call is for a more sustainable world – and for health systems that meet the needs of both patients and the planet.