Energy management at Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust

“The rising costs of fossil fuels and the increased awareness of environmental concerns have forced energy management further up the NHS agenda. As a colleague mentioned to me some months ago – there’s never been a better time to bang your energy conservation drum. And said drum has taken a resounding battering over the past two years as accountants and environmentalists alike have started to become energy savvy. The talk in staff canteens at lunchtime may not entirely consist of CO2 targets and renewables, but people are becoming aware, and more than that they are becoming ‘interested’. People are actually interested in the use and the waste of energy!
    
“For many years Gwent NHS Trust had prided itself on being a positive and in many ways innovative organisation in terms of energy management. There had been technical achievements and improvements in recent years. For example, Combined Heat and Power (CHP) has proved to be a huge success at two of the acute hospitals (one of which has also been linked to absorption chilling) through a PFI project with Honeywell, automatic lighting controls, a replacement programme of high efficiency motors and upgrading of monitoring and targeting software. But whilst we forged ahead with our engineering solutions we were still missing one vital element – people solutions.”

Spreading the knowledge
“So we set about creating an energy awareness campaign. The aim of which was to increase knowledge, making staff aware of energy and the impact of wasting it. The mammoth task we had set ourselves was to facilitate a change in thinking, to transform an intrinsically wasteful working culture into one which is an effective shade of green. It was at this point that the Energy Institute (EI) became my comforting source of knowledge that would guide me onwards.
    
“With some initial guidance from consultants NIFES and the Carbon Trust, the knowledge base of the EI, the commitment of the Trust Board and the support of our chairman we formally launched the campaign in May 2006. One of the key rudiments was that the campaign would not be a disparate assembly of different messages, involving many disjointed elements. With some reticence I use one of the most dreaded of management words “synergy”. If we were to succeed it was vital that the campaign most certainly became more than the sum of its parts.”

Trust Energy Policy
“The (formerly adopted) Trust Energy Policy provided the foundations whilst the campaign strategic plan provided the schema by which we would co-ordinate the separate promotional tools we had chosen to implement.
    
“Local primary schools were engaged to design energy saving posters, the twelve best designs being reproduced as posters, which adorn the normally drab notice boards of Trust properties. These poster designs were also used to produce a calendar. One of the participating schools also wrote a short play: ‘What global warming means to us’ which they performed at our campaign launch event.
    
“A website has been created and will soon form an integral part of the Trust’s intranet site, with links from every desktop. Energy awareness talks/training have been given to staff groups identified as key users e.g. domestics, catering, works and estates staff.
    
“The crux of the campaign, however, is the recruitment of local energy representatives. These LER’s take a geographical responsibility for their working environment and the use of energy within. Providing ideas/suggestions of how energy could be used more effectively in their area, letting us know if energy is being misused and encouraging colleagues to be mindful of energy use. This has opened up a splendid channel of communication that lets us know where and when problems exist.”

The importance of communication
“One of the most exciting and perhaps unexpected outcomes of this campaign has been an increase in inter-departmental communication. Talking to thy neighbour has traditionally not always been a practice observed in the public sector, but now we find ourselves talking energy with IT, procurement, catering, facilities and so on. Life cycle costing and the energy implications of purchases were just funny sounding terms that were almost unheard of in the very recent past.
    
“Of course we still look for engineering solutions. For example; LED lights have been installed in areas where 24 hour lighting is required saving over 20,000 kg of CO2 per annum, photocell/PIR lighting controls have reduced the length of time lights are on in certain areas by up to 90 per cent, BMS upgrades have proved invaluable in some smaller community hospitals (not only in saving energy but in improving building services provision) and biomass boilers are likely to be the source of space heating and DHW in our new hospitals programme.
    
“But we are now also integrating the people solution into energy management, which we believe is the truly sustainable way to be more energy efficient.”.