Guy’s and St Thomas’ air quality partnership

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest and busiest NHS trusts in the country. But most of its sites are in some of the most polluted areas of London. That’s a concern for the health of patients and staff, not to mention residents who breathe toxic air every day. 

Air pollution is the single biggest environmental threat to people’s health. It contributes to up to 4,000 deaths per year in London and up to 43,000 per year in the UK. 

Some people are particularly susceptible to the harmful health effects of air pollution, including children, older people, and people with health conditions. People from minoritised communities are disproportionately affected by poor air quality in cities such as London.  

Many of these people either work at the Trust’s sites or will visit at some point, often when they are at their most vulnerable.  

My role as Air Quality Manager at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is to reduce our contribution to local air pollution, and to work with staff and patients to better protect them from, and educate them about, air pollution and its harmful effects on health.  

As an organisation that prioritises and promotes good health, it’s important that Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust acknowledges that it contributes to air pollution – whether by transporting patients, the deliveries it receives, or construction projects – and it’s even more important that the Trust takes steps to understand and reduce this contribution.  

Through our partnership with Impact on Urban Health we’re designing solutions to lower our polluting emissions while communicating with staff and patients about poor air quality.  

Reducing our polluting emissions

During the first 18 months of the partnership we identified how the Trust contributes to poor local air quality and how we could reduce air pollution at source. We also identified the data we would need to gather and asked ourselves how we can protect staff and patients from local air pollution and communicate about this issue.  

Cargo bikes

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust runs across five acute hospitals – where patients receive active care – and over 100 smaller sites where we provide local community services. This means there are complex and frequent transport operations that contribute to already high levels of local air pollution. 

One way of reducing this transport footprint is to look at how our home-visiting colleagues move around our local communities. We have, for example, over 400 neighbourhood nurses across the Trust that have traditionally used cars to get to their patients’ homes.  

As a test project, we gave two e-bikes to members of our neighbourhood nursing team at Mawbey Brough Health Centre. The bikes, which have excellent sustainability credentials, have large panniers that allow the nurses to transport all their equipment. 

The introduction of e-bikes presented more challenges than we anticipated, from the training needs of our staff, to bike theft, and fire safety concerns around the charging of e-bike batteries.  

Still, we believe in the significant potential of this project and not only from an air quality perspective. But also, its ability to improve operational efficiency with the nurses having reported mental and physical health benefits.