As part of a new feature series focusing on how digital and technology can support healthcare providers achieve their targets set out in their greener NHS plans, we spoke to James Rawlinson, Director of Health Informatics from Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust.
We discussed the trust’s green strategy, the digital projects supporting it, some of their challenges and successes, as well what has made the greatest impact so far.
Here’s what James had to share…
What the green plan is working towards
“The Trust over the last couple of years has been investing quite heavily in green technology – things like lithium battery storage systems and LED lighting across the estate,” said James. “We used the carbon energy fund to develop a 20 year energy performance contract enabling us to replace old boilers and install start of the art combined heat and power plants.
“We have invested years and millions in terms of updating a lot of our old machinery, particularly relating to heating, chilling and lighting across the organisation. In terms of day-to-day things, most of our lights are LED and we’ve also just installed electric car chargers in our car parks. The plan is for the chargers to be at a rate that is super competitive to at-home chargers.”
Digital projects supporting the green plan
Some of the digital projects at the trust were in place pre-COVID, James shared, but the pandemic has accelerated things. “Pre-COVID, we moved to what we call ‘small form factor PCs’ which consume a lot less energy, but now I’ve heard people say that they won’t buy a PC ever again. As it’s all about laptops these days which have a much slower power consumption. We’re also following in the footsteps of our close partners at Barnsley Hospital, and using Raspberry PIs in use cases such as Ewhiteboards
“Clearly people working from home is helping our carbon reduction,” James noted, adding that although there aren’t as many home workers as there were at the start of the pandemic, there are still less people travelling to and from work. “Obviously, with healthcare, community teams will need to travel to people’s houses,” he added.
“In addition, we have just about updated and migrated our storage area network – that’s going from digital spinning magnetic disks to what is essentially the same technology as flash drives, so again it consumes less power. From a data centre perspective, we have had a cloud first strategy for about four to five years now. With all the new technology upgrades are on a public or private cloud so they’re not on internal datacentres consuming power and cooling.”
Challenges and successes
James said: “The storage area network has gone pretty well! I think moving things to the cloud is pretty difficult – when traditional healthcare software suppliers who focus on making and delivering software, where the software runs isn’t always a consideration. When we speak to them about the cloud first, sometimes they are not really sure how they approach that.
“I think also getting engineers onsite to come and do stuff with new parts and new upgrades has been really really difficult in the last couple of years, during the pandemic, as you can imagine. We have had to shut down some of those programmes for the best part of 4 months.
“Another thing – we’ve just got business case approval for it, so the timing is really good – is that we are going to be deploying software onto every device, so that devices which are turned on will automatically shut themselves down out of business hours.” Whilst this will save electricity consumption, James added that it poses challenges of its own: “That needs to be done really carefully, as what we don’t want to do is risk shutting down the ePrecscribig PCs at two o’clock in the morning, or when they’re about to administer some drugs to patients – probably not a good idea!”
What will make the biggest impact?
“I’ve been doing this for nearly 30 years,” said James, “and it’s only in the last three or four years where storage technology and battery technology have become more efficient and cost efficient and their power consumption is a tenth or a fifth of what a traditional disk technology is. And along with moves to cloud adaption now under way across the NHS, at scale, that will make big differences.
Environmental impact for patients
“Pre-COVID, we did lots of work with Microsoft Teams around video consultations,” James commented. “We didn’t do it from a green perspective, but clearly patients not travelling to hospitals helps with the nations carbon footprint. There are lots of telephone consultations going on as well – that’s the biggest impact I can think of.”
Changes to the workforce through digital and sustainability
Rounding up the interview, James shared a comment on how sustainability has changed working lives for staff.
“The biggest change is that it’s pretty acceptable now for us to be flexible about where we work and how we work by using technology. If it means less miles on a motorway, that’s got to be a good thing.”
Many thanks to James for sharing his time and thoughts.
