Our Roadmap to 2030Lead Organisation
Sustainability West Midlands
Project Delivery team: Morgan Roberts (Project Manager), Louis March-Smith (Project and Data Officer), Alan Carr (Climate Change Adaptation Lead)
Customers
Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust (RUH), Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (GWH) in Swindon, and Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust (SFT)
Overview
SWM developed a climate change risk assessment and adaptation plan for the Hospitals Group that sits within the Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire (BSW) Integrated Care System (ICS) (‘The Group’). The Group is a partnership allowing the three Hospital Trusts, RUH, GWH and SFT, to work together to ensure access to beds and treatment across the area, as well as carry out joint strategic planning such as this project.
In recognition that the NHS needs to be able to adapt to climate change to help reduce the impacts on health and healthcare delivery, The Group asked for SWM’s support to better understand, manage, and prepare for extreme weather events and an increasing likelihood and severity of these in future.
Outputs
In recognition that the NHS needs to be able to adapt to climate change to help reduce the impacts on health and healthcare delivery, The Group asked for SWM’s support to better understand, manage, and prepare for extreme weather events and an increasing likelihood and severity of these in future.
Through extensive engagement and research, the following outputs have been delivered:
- The main resource: a Climate Change Adaptation Plan for The Group.
- A Climate Change Projections Report, outlining the future climate change projections for the BSW region.
- A Climate Risk and Vulnerability Report, highlighting areas that could be particularly vulnerable to climate hazards in the area including flood maps of key sites in the three Trusts.
- An Adaptation Maturity Assessment, assessing the ‘adaptive capacity’ of the three Trusts using the Climate Adaptation Framework for NHS organisations in England.
Hyperlinks to the above outputs will be included when they are published.
By way of stakeholder engagement, we:
- Ran an online workshop with around 15 stakeholders to introduce the importance of climate adaptation and to hear how they have been impacted by severe weather and what they believe needs to be done to effectively adapt to climate change.
- Conducted ~14 one-to-one online meetings with various stakeholders both internal to the Trusts and from other organisations to ask in-depth questions about climate adaptation, by way of a follow-up to the workshop.
- Ran an online survey alongside the above to capture the views of any stakeholders who were not able to attend a one-to-one meeting.
- Held a second workshop with internal stakeholders, introducing the climate adaptation framework to teams within the three Trusts and assessing the maturity of each Trust against the four capabilities within the adaptation framework.
- Ran a consultation phase to provide stakeholders the opportunity to provide feedback to a first draft of the final Adaptation Plan.
Testimonial
The Group recognises the importance of understanding the risks from climate change to our services and the communities we serve, as building resilience in the NHS is essential to delivering effective healthcare. SWM brought the expertise, insight, and structure needed to drive this work forwards, including an understanding of the complexities of the healthcare system essential to the project’s success. The teams’ approach to engagement resulted in outputs that were locally relevant, practical, and felt co-created. The extensive engagement also importantly helped raise awareness of climate change across our organisations, helping show adaptation is not one team’s responsibility, but requires ownership and input from clinical and non-clinical teams across The Group and beyond. The outcomes from this project have given us a clear, strategic foundation to guide our response to climate change and integrate adaptation into our long-term planning.
Gemma Heath, Salisbury Foundation Trust and Chelsey Green, Great Western Hospitals on behalf of The Group’s Sustainability teams.
For further information on the project or to work with us in one of a variety of ways, please see our consultancy page or contact the SWM team on enquiries@swm.org.uk.
