Cornwall's NHS gets £100,000 to go carbon neutral and deliver 'green theatre'
The funding will go towards reusable PPE, drapes and other textiles
Last updated 12th Mar 2022
The trust that runs Cornwall's main hospitals is receiving £100,000 to create a 'green theatre'.
Cash will go towards stuff like reusable PPR and replacing the disposable gowns and drapes used during surgery with fabric and textiles.
The partnership project is part of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals' NHS Trust's Net Zero target of becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
The funding from Revolution-ZERO will go towards plastic free alternatives, like replacing disposable PPE, drapes and other textiles that are currently used in approximately 11,500,000 surgical procedures across the UK.
Roz Davies is a General Manager at the RCHT and works alongside the sustainability team.
"It's very exciting for Cornwall. We've been leading in quite a few areas for sustainability but this one is fairly pioneering and will certainly be a world first.
"We were lucky enough to work with revolution zero who are specialists in textiles so that would be surgical masks that you see in the streets, but about two years ago we moved over to reusable, certainly for non-clinical areas which dropped our usage massively. Last year we moved to reusable for clinical areas. This was the natural next step".
The pilot project is one of 10 in England to be awarded the funding, designed to bring benefits to patients and care service users and reduce carbon emissions and disposable waste.
These solutions also needed to demonstrate how they will maintain and improve the overall delivery of healthcare and health outcomes within the NHS.
The projects will run up to six months, to see whether changes will make the impact they hope to achieve. with the aim to demonstrate whether innovations are technically feasible and have an impact on carbon reductions.
The re-usable textiles that will be used will be manufactured and processed to make sure there is zero waste and zero carbon emissions, and the project will continue to evolve to try and meet its target.
The scheme was developed in partnership with the Greener NHS Programme, AHSN Network and Accelerated Access Collaborative.
Roz continued: "'Green theatre' is about creating a theatre which has huge emissions, so a surgical operation theatre which roughly has around 3,200 tonnes of CO2 annually from the gowns, hat, mask but we're still using all of that but changing it to fabric.
"We're going to have to tweak things as we go along. After six months we will decide if this is viable to spread through the hospital. Your mind opens in a different way and we are very happy hosts to have this in Cornwall. This could have gone anywhere. To be a leader of sustainability and that's in Cornwall, it's very exciting times for us".
Thom Lafferty, Director of Strategy and Performance at RCHT, said: "We’re excited to have been awarded funding for this partnership project to take forward our ground-breaking ‘Green Theatre’ innovation; it has the potential to be a real game-changer for the NHS.
"It is a fantastic achievement, once again placing RCHT at the cutting edge of environmental sustainability advancements within the healthcare sector".