Green Impact for Health Conference Videos - Frome Medical Practice

Dr Helen Kingston and Dr Rebecca Hall 

"This is the first national green impact conference."

Rebecca - "This is the first national green impact conference. It is about sharing the real joy of practising sustainable healthcare. It is really exciting it has come to Frome, we have been working on it for the last few years."

Helen – "It’s not just the medical practice, it’s our colleagues at the council, and Edventure, that are coming together with us, to tell the story of what we have been doing in Frome and to try and move things on the next stage."

Rebecca – "The NHS has a huge carbon impact in the country. 5% of the carbon footprint of Britain is the NHS. To have an impact we need to reduce primary care prescribing, and there are great ways to do that where we can reduce medication by prescribing things that are not medication."

Helen – "So much of what impacts on our health is not that narrow medical field, so just being able to broaden that scope to social relationships, removing health inequalities, financial inequalities that are driving some of the difficulties, and that isn’t something that the NHS is going to solve on its own, it needs to be a collaboration across politicians, across communities, across health, social care, everybody getting involved."

Rebecca – "and what we’ve really found is by working like this is actually, it's super-super rewarding. It is very empowering for patients to feel that they can take responsibility for their care and that has an impact on our relationship with them, which is really positive, and ultimately everybody wins because we feel better at doing our job, the patient feels better for not having to take loads and loads of medication. They feel healthier and fitter and it reduces the amount of carbon that we put into the atmosphere."