Tower Hamlets GP Practice is awarded Gold Green Impact For Health Award
The RCGP Green Impact for Health Toolkit is designed to provide practical advice and tips to general practices across the UK, that want to improve their sustainability. Thirteen practices in north east London have signed up to use the toolkit and The Aberfeldy Practice in Tower Hamlets is the first to achieve gold award status. Two have silver, one has bronze and nine are still working through the first steps.
The Aberfeldy Practice achieved their award by completing actions including:
- Prescribing lower carbon inhalers
- Reducing electricity and gas use
- Completing a sustainable QI project on coil fitting
- Multiple team members attending carbon literacy courses
- Learning about and promoting healthy sustainable diets and buying Fairtrade products
- Being an Active Practice, a parkrun Practice and a Safe Surgery
- Promoting active transport (walking, cycling and public transport use).
Dr Sophie von Heimendahl, GP at the Aberfeldy Practice said “We are so proud to have worked as a team to achieve Gold. It really was a team effort and it’s been great to see everyone get on board and make contributions.”
Dr Emma Radcliffe a Partner at the practice and a NEL Net Zero Clinical Lead, said “Despite the huge pressures on General Practice at the moment, it is possible to make significant operational changes. We all need to be working on reducing our carbon footprint and many actions are just good medicine e.g. improving asthma care. Several of the actions we have taken reduced cost pressures for example, our energy bills would have been much higher had it not been for our switch off policy.”
The Tollgate Medical Centre in Beckton is also celebrating achieving Silver this month. Another of our Net Zero Clinical Leads, Dr Cat Gaynor worked with her Practice Business Manager, Martin Street. Martin says “We are very proud of the work that we have begun in becoming Greener and are delighted to be recognised with a Silver Award for our efforts so far. We found the toolkit to be very straightforward in it’s asking for information but quite tricky in places to achieve just now. We’ve learnt a lot along the way and see that there are areas where we can still improve!”
To see the toolkits you can click here for dentistry and click here for general practice. Please contact us via nelondonicb.nelgreenteam@nhs.net if you have any further questions about a Greener NHS.
We would like to share other teams’ success stories of reducing health inequalities and Greener Practice, so please contact us via nelondonicb.nelgreenteam@nhs.net