We are delighted to welcome the members of the Health and Sustainability Network, which has joined forces with The Campaign for Greener Healthcare. The group contains many notable public health and related professionals in the NHS, local government and the third sector and the expertise and energy of these members is a great addition to our existing group of partners and supporters.
We hope you will find us as lively and committed as your founder group, and we look forward to working with you over the coming years. Please do get involved - contact us if you have any questions or ideas and you can suggest news and events for the web any time as well as sending us podcasts, photos and links.
The documents and resources on the website www.healthandsustainability.net are being transferred to this website and to SHEBA (www.sustainabilityforhealth.org), which offers a large and growing evidence base for sustainable development. A new “public health” section will be created on the SHEBA website and linked to the other key areas on that website. We will ensure that SHEBA encompasses the interests of the Health and Sustainability Network across the wider public health workforce in national and local government and the voluntary and community sector, as well as in the NHS.
More about the Health and Sustainability Network
In 2006 Jenny Griffiths, Alison Hill and Jackie Spiby drafted a manifesto for linking health and sustainability and for beginning to tackle climate change from the health sector. The final manifesto, agreed after many drafts in early 2008 is on SHEBA and is summarised below.
The Manifesto has five sections:
1. The importance of sustainable development for health
2. A commitment to work with UK Government Departments and related agencies, and the European Commission, to strengthen policy implementation
3. A commitment to take action to ensure that existing opportunities to promote sustainable development are used to best effect within the NHS and the wider public health community
4. A commitment to take action to strengthen the position of sustainable development within workforce development
5. A commitment to lead by example by implementing personal and organisational carbon audits and ecological footprint analyses
It was the vital early work of this group which raised the profile of climate change within the health sector sufficiently for the agenda to spread outside public health, leading to a big conference at the Royal College of Physicians, the beginning of The Campaign for Greener Healthcare, The Climate and Health Council and the launch of the Sustainable Development Unit of the NHS all at the start of 2008.
Without this group, much of the important work on co-benefits [link to Lancet series page] would not have been carried out and be well-known internationally.
It is also thanks to the personal efforts of the founders: Jenny Griffiths, Alison Hill and Jackie Spiby that the original network was so dynamic and achieved so much with no funding. They can be credited with much more than their publications but these are also a lasting legacy:
The Health Practitioner’s Guide to Climate Change, Earthscan, 2009
The Faculty of Public Health’s guide: Sustaining a Healthy Future: Taking Action on Climate Change
The network has decided to join with The Campaign for Greener Healthcare which was the ‘nearest fit’ to the original aims of the group and has achieved much during its first two years, so that we pool our considerable resources and achieve even more during 2010.