OPINION: Going green for our healthcare could be better for us all
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Dr Andrew Dallas, a GP partner at Cairn Medical Practice in Inverness and the north of Scotland Royal College of General Practitioners’ climate champion, outlines the need for climate smart healthcare:
What an unnerving time we are all living through at the present time.
We all, to varying degrees, go through challenging times and have health concerns, but it has been many generations since we have all simultaneously experienced the same threat, together, to our health.
Covid-19 has shaken our society and collective health in ways that we could scarcely have believed would be possible a year ago.
But at the same time, we have demonstrated how well we can adapt and pull together when required to do so.
This pause in our lives has given many of us the space to reflect on how we live and how we want to live going forward.
It has shaken my profession and, just like society in general, our NHS must consider how it develops from this point onwards.
We have known the threat of pandemics for a long time.
However, we also know that pandemics are not the only threat to our collective health.
A decade ago the Lancet declared that climate change was the greatest threat to our health this century.
The pandemic has a sense of immediacy to it, but this greater, creeping threat gathers pace with each passing year.
Our response to climate change must be just as urgent.
As in all sectors, this is true for healthcare, as the NHS contributes five per cent to our nation’s emissions.
There is a real risk that all this doom and gloom paralyses, rather than galvanises, us.
But what Covid-19 has shown is that in a crisis, being well prepared, thinking ahead and adapting, together, is vital and can be a hugely powerful force.
We need to evolve – we have no choice. The 21st century version of the NHS just cannot wait.
Our old 20th century model looks a bit like this: Patient develops a problem; patient attends doctor; doctor assesses patient; doctors prescribes medicine.
The new model must focus on what often works better for some conditions – “non-medical” interventions and prevention.
Medication, surgery and high-tech advances clearly have their place, but for many conditions we could improve and preserve our health better, and use our NHS better, by focussing on other simple, patient-centred, holistic interventions.
So over the coming months, your local doctors will put pen to paper to tell you about a few of the simple things that we can do together to look after you better, and greener.
We’ll talk about inhalers, about diabetes, about where your medicines end up, about simple ways to help yourself and the NHS that will have a much greater effect than weekly clapping, touched though we were by that gesture from so many of you.
Climate-smart healthcare is better healthcare.
It is not a choice between healthcare and the planet, they go hand in hand.
We should be striving for all that is “Good for you: Good for the Planet.
Time to start thinking beyond Covid-19!
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