Last week, the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health and the College Centre for Quality Improvement at the Royal College of Psychiatrists launched the ‘delivering greener, more sustainable & net zero mental health care’ guidance and education.
The report highlights the threat that the climate crisis can have on everyone’s physical and mental health. The findings of the report include essential actions that all organisations should be working towards to achieve low carbon mental health care.
These are aligned with the four principles of low carbon care, as developed by Greener NHS.
These recommendations include:
- Embracing ‘circular economy’ – a way for us to always share, lease, reuse, repair, refurbish and recycle existing materials and products we use, to ensure we use these for as long as possible.
- Improving the energy efficiency of buildings, including recycling and waste management.
- Enabling sustainable and low carbon transport.
- Reducing travel miles linked to mental health care services.
- Increasing access to greener spaces.
- Improving leadership and learning and development about sustainability.
Everyturn Mental Health’s Net Zero and Sustainability Lead, Sam Cassidy, commented:
“We welcome this guidance and agree that greener, more sustainable mental health care must be a priority to prevent further development of mental health problems. Supporting a person’s wellbeing involves working with everything that’s important to them; including where and how they are able to live their life.
The cost of living and climate crises are only increasing the challenges that already make life so hard for so many of the people we support through our services.
This year, we were proud to publish our Sustainability Vision Statement and Carbon Reduction Plan, which set out our commitment to making a measurable positive impact on our communities and achieving net zero by 2030.
We are already making practical, sustainable changes within our organisation that benefit everyone and demonstrate social value; meaning that we will measure our impact and actions based on other factors than financial to ensure that everyone makes better decisions for everyone’s greater wellbeing.
But we know that this is just the start of our sustainability journey. We are being ambitious in embedding sustainability and social value in all our decision-making across all our teams. We want to empower our colleagues to make the right decisions to benefit the people we support, our colleagues, commissioners, and everyone in our supply chains.”