NHS Property Services (NHSPS) has published their Green Plan for 2022-2025, underlining their commitment to reducing its environmental impact and promoting sustainable healthcare now and in the future.
Here we will take a look at the Green Plan, focusing in particular on the role of digital and data.
The plan starts by outlining the key areas in which improvements are set to take to place, including better use of date for estate management. Other key areas include more resources to channel into patient care, improve workforce engagement on climate change, and conserving, protecting and enhancing estate biodiversity.
To make improvements happen in these areas, the plan identifies workstreams with objectives and planned activities.
One of the eight workstreams is digital transformation. The plan sets out the objective: “use technology to collate data and process information to reduce travel and paper, while also improving decision-making processes.”
The planned activities include making use of web app development, Smarter Buildings programme and Smarter Working policy, to enable staff to collate and share information easily, without the need to travel or print. Smarter Working policy was implemented by NHSPS in 2021 to allow task allocation, document retention and quality control to move from paper processing to electronic; the Smarter Buildings programme is due to be rolled out over the next three years to enable properties to be connected remotely via broadband or mobile technologies.
Among the web-based applications planned for implementation, the strategy states: “Cleaning Audits, Building Inspections and Environmental Compliance apps will be rolled out to complement the Computer Added Facilities Management (CAFM) already in use.”
When it comes to data, the Green Plan shares how collation of greater data into the Enterprise Data Hub (EHD) allows for detailed analysis to be produced:”Whereas some of this data is important for operational and financial purposes, other types of data are useful from an energy and environmental management point of view,” the strategy says. “To secure and leverage this data, we are investigating the potential of a dedicated utilities software platform, which will enable improved data management, screening and cleaning before being integrated into the EDH.”
The Green Plan can be read in full here.
