The list is growing each day,

Waseem Ishaq, our sustainability and carbon manager, on all the initiatives underway to help make our hospitals greener.

We only launched our three-year ‘green plan’ last October, and we’re already saving around £175,000 a year thanks to solar panels on the roof of four blocks at King George Hospital, have 90% LED lighting at the same hospital, and are about to launch a campaign which will reduce our plastic waste by slashing the number of disposable gloves we use, we purchased 23million pairs in 2024/2025 alone.

It was as we launched our green plan last year that we secured a grant of almost £1.1 million from Great British Energy through the Greener NHS programme to install solar panels at King George Hospital (below). The panels are creating 10-15% of the energy our hospital uses, helping to slash our £20k a month electricity bill.

And we don’t plan to stop there, by next March we plan to have panels installed on two further blocks at the hospital, increasing our green energy use and saving even more.

A third phase of the project will go even further, Waseem explains:

We plan to introduce a solar car port. It’s quite innovative and would mean building a roof over the car park and installing solar panels on it. It’s a major project which would help us save around £225k a year.

We hope to have it completed by March 2029. We also want to introduce solar panels at Queen’s Hospital by 2029, it takes a little longer as we don’t own the building. Panels are a quick win with lots of benefits so are absolutely worth it.

In March we completed the roll-out of 360 LED light fittings across our Renal and Juniper wards at King George Hospital (pictured above), taking the site to 90% LED lighting, which is much more energy efficient than traditional lighting. This will help us save an additional £17k a year and was also funded through the Greener NHS programme.

We plan to tackle the last 10% to bring the hospital to 100% LED lighting as soon as we can, as well as the remaining 20% of lighting which needs upgrading at Queen’s Hospital.

We’ll soon be launching a pilot ‘Gloves Off’ campaign across our A&Es and intensive care units, to reduce inappropriate use of examination gloves. Use of these disposable gloves increased post-Covid; in 2024/25 we purchased 23million pairs and they’re being used when they’re not necessary, such as for routine care or changing bed linen where we should be using good hand hygiene instead.

Ruth Green, Clinical Group Director of Nursing for Acute and Emergency Medicine, said:

The aim of the Gloves Off campaign is to improve safety, sustainability and the quality of care for our patients, and shows how the simplest changes can deliver big gains. By removing unnecessary glove use, we can help restore patient dignity and enable more compassionate, person-centred care.

It also strengthens infection prevention by promoting proper hand hygiene. And it’s much greener, helping us reduce our impact on the environment. So many of our patients and teams spend time in A&E, I can’t think of a better location to launch this campaign.

Our electronic patient record, which we introduced in November, has meant less reliance on paper while also improving care for patients, and we’re not only looking to cut waste in clinical departments, we’re working with our catering partners to reduce food waste by 30% this year, and introduce more plant based meals and low carbon recipes.