At South East London Integrated Care System (ICS), we recognise that the climate emergency is a health emergency. The health and social impacts of poor environment and climate change are already being felt by our communities, and it is often the most vulnerable who are the most disadvantaged by these impacts. South East London ICS is committed to reducing health inequalities and supporting prevention of ill-health, and we know that by creating a healthy environment, we help keep our people in good health too.
South East London ICS has made strong progress on sustainability. Since launching our first Green Plan in 2022, we’ve delivered on 90 of our ICS net zero objectives. This means we are contributing to the NHS target of being a net zero health service by 2045, whilst improving the local environment, improving care and supporting local communities.
Between 2021 and 2024, NHS Trusts in south east London cut their direct carbon emissions by more than 10%. This includes reductions in emissions from anaesthetic gases, our buildings (including energy use, heating and lighting), travel, waste and carbon-intense asthma inhalers.
These changes are part of a wider effort to make our services greener and healthier. We’ve also installed solar panels and LED lighting across NHS sites, created green spaces for patients and staff, and developed long term plans to cut emissions from GP buildings.
We’ve added electric vehicles to our NHS fleets and installed charging points. We’ve supported walking and cycling, set up anti-idling zones, and we monitor air quality to understand how we can improve it. These changes are helping reduce pollution and support better respiratory health.
We’ve increased the use of low-carbon inhalers and launched the an inhaler recycling pilot alongside King’s College Hospital and community pharmacies. We’ve also run campaigns to reduce medicine waste and created tools to support safer repeat prescribing and to reduce overprescribing.
We’ve rolled out the London Care Record to improve care coordination and expanded remote monitoring and virtual wards. We’ve recycled hundreds of pieces of IT equipment, with many redistributed to people who would otherwise be digitally excluded. We’ve also added sustainability checks to supplier contracts to make sure our digital services support our environmental goals.
We now ask our suppliers to include carbon reduction and social value plans when they supply goods and services to our NHS organisations. We’ve adopted circular economy principles and use the Evergreen Supplier Assessment to check sustainability credentials. In catering, we’ve begun to introduce plant-based meal options and we now use smarter food ordering systems to cut waste.
We’ve begun to develop climate risk registers, so that we can identify how to adapt NHS services to safeguard them against extreme weathers, so they are always available to our patients when they need them. We’ve expanded green and blue spaces, planted trees so provide natural resilience to our increasingly hot summers, and we’ve increased biodiversity across NHS sites.
We have now refreshed our original Green Plan, and present the South East London ICS Green Plan for 2025 to 2028. Our new Green Plan:
The South East London ICS Green Plan 2025-2028 serves as an overarching system-wide strategy for delivering a net zero NHS in south east London by 2045. It connects with the Green Plans of the five south east London NHS Trusts, but also addresses the requirement for strong leadership, effective delivery networks and finding and sharing best practice across the integrated care system.
From sustainable river boat deliveries to low-carbon inhalers, our system partners are already taking innovative actions to be more sustainable.
The challenge of improving our environment is not going away any time soon and we know that it is linked to the health of our population. Our aim is to keep improving our health service and to enable every member of our population to be - and stay – healthy. We know we can do this more effectively by creating healthy environments in south east London. This is why we continue to deliver on our aim to be good stewards of the environment while we deliver safe, effective and high-quality NHS services.
Tosca Fairchild, Chief of Staff and ICS Senior Responsible Officer for Environmental Sustainability