King's College London

At the end of March, Melanie Maddison and Jocelyn Cornish from Adult Nursing in the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care (NMPC) and Kate Bazin and Lorna Johnson from Physiotherapy in the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine (FoLSM) met Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care at Westminster to highlight the importance of embedding sustainability within healthcare programmes.

Melanie, Jocelyn and Kate have been involved in the Clinical Skills Sustainability Project, a research project that aims to address the waste generated from clinical skills education sessions. Though it's not clinically infective, this waste is currently categorised as clinical waste for incineration, with higher environmental and financial costs.

The Clinical Skills Sustainability Project seeks to reduce the carbon footprint of clinical skills education across NMPC and FoLSM where nursing, midwifery, medical and physiotherapy students receive education.

In Westminster, the academics collectively highlighted the importance of education for sustainability in undergraduate programmes to equip the future inter-professional workforce with knowledge and skills to shape and deliver sustainable patient-centred care. Additionally, they identified the role of Advanced Clinical Practitioners on post-graduate programmes as being well placed to lead quality improvement service developments which focus on sustainability principles of prevention, health promotion and service redesign to offset and reduce the carbon emissions produced by the NHS.

Wes Streeting was interested in the educational initiatives in the Faculties to embed sustainability education within the healthcare programmes, to promote interprofessional working and role model sustainable practice. He was attentive to the examples of student work on the MSc Advanced Clinical Practice programme who use this learning to implement quality improvements within their own clinical organisations, providing benefits for patients, staff, the service and the environment.