New clean air initiative launched for England’s North East and Cumbria

A scheme to tackle poor air quality around hospitals and community health hubs aims to reduce deaths in a region recording more air pollution-related fatalities than the UK capital. 

A new clean air initiative has been set up in North East England and Cumbria, which policymakers hope will help bring down the region’s death rate linked PM2.5 air pollution, which is currently higher than that of London. 

For the past six months, the environmental change charity Global Action Plan has been working closely with the UK’s leading sustainability Integrated Care System (ICS) in the North East and Cumbria region (NENC). As part of this, the Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has already committed to ensuring all staff receive sustainability training, and is embedding green procurement across the organisation, while encouraging ICS members to switch to renewable energy tariffs. This forms part of the wider Integrated Care for Cleaner Air project, which aims to help every ICS in England become a Clean Air Champion, delivered through a partnership between Newcastle Hospitals, Global Action Plan, and Boehringer Ingelheim.

Findings from the Newcastle pilot have been published in a new report, ‘Levers for Change’. The document not only offers an unprecedented insight into air pollution levels and sources across the North East of England, but also analyses changes hospitals and health centres can make to improve air quality, highlighting the links between pollution and health inequalities, and identifies opportunities created through the establishment of an ICS. 

‘Sadly we know that people in the North East and North Cumbria are disproportionately burdened by ill health. The research presented in the ‘Levers for Change’ report is key to understanding the impact that air quality has on the health
outcomes of the people of the region, and the framework will be an extremely useful resource for us, as an ICS to use, to identify ways to work across organisations and reduce the impact that poor air quality has on the health and quality of life for the most vulnerable members of our society,’ said James Dixon, Associate Director Sustainability at The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

‘It is vital that we tackle air pollution at the regional ICS level, with partners from all across the health system, across primary and secondary care but also with local government – it is vital that everyone understands the NHS cannot tackle air pollution alone,’ added Larissa Lockwood, Director of Clean Air, Global Action Plan. ‘Insights from the ‘Levers for Change’ report will be packaged into an interactive, freely available tool for all Integrated Care Systems in England to use. This tool will build on the Clean Air Hospital Framework developed in partnership with Great Ormond Street Hospital.’

Earlier this year, it was found that every medical centre in London exceeded World Health Organisation limits on air pollution, with a previous study revealing one in four hospitals in the UK broke standards for dangerous PM2.5 fine particulate matter.