By Dr Duika Burges Watson, CSH Nature Recovery Ranger at The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
“We spend an hour of mandatory training learning about trip hazards…”
The comment came from the audience after we screened the People’s Emergency Briefing at Newcastle Hospitals, and it does seem ridiculous that we are not sharing expert voices on how climate change will impact our services. Because it is a climate, nature and health emergency, and we need to say this with our outside voices. The NHS has big reasons to: we are already on the frontline of climate emergency impacts, we are woefully underprepared and need to be ready to adapt, and, according to the WHO, healthcare professionals are among the most trusted voices on climate, nature and health.
I helped with the screening in my role as Nature Recovery Ranger – encouraged to do so because CSH accepts the climate emergency is also a nature and health emergency. So do our trust and Sustainability team, who helped run the event at the RVI’s Medicinema, a charity-operated working cinema inside the hospital. Screenings there are normally reserved for patients, so we are grateful to Mark and the Medicinema team for making an exception for us. Newcastle Hospitals was the first trust to declare a climate emergency – here’s hoping we might be the first trust to make sure all our staff know about it.
The film brings together the latest evidence on the climate and nature crisis and what it means for the UK. It grew out of the National Emergency Briefing, held at Westminster Central Hall last November and attended by over 1,200 people including MPs, peers and leaders. The film is intended to be watched together, in communities like ours, and it is now being shown internationally with communities making their own versions. It is scary, but also a balanced report with solutions, hope, and a few laughs courtesy of Jennifer Saunders. “Why can’t we manage our own shit!” landed well in the room.
One of the scientists in the film, Professor Hayley Fowler, was in our audience – watching it for the seventh time. She told us that of the 600 MPs invited to the Westminster briefing, only around 80 came. A gap that tells its own story. Hayley is part of our own climate story here too: she helped launch Newcastle Hospitals’ first Climate Emergency Strategy in October 2020, presenting on the science at our virtual launch event in the middle of Covid. I first met her years ago on the Bicycle Users’ Group at Newcastle University, campaigning for better resources to support cyclists. It feels a world apart to be sitting in a hospital cinema together talking about this.
We ran the session using the Climate Psychology Alliance’s facilitation guide for these screenings. Feelings first: space to say how the film landed before action plans. Then a question – what response feels right at this moment? The answers came fast. Roll it out across the Trust. Make it part of induction. Put it on the learning platform as a module, like net zero training. Cascade it – everyone who comes to a showing gets the tools to host their own. Show it to the board and to every clinical board lead. Three board members, including our chief financial officer (who is also deputy CEO), were in the room, and the suggestions were heard with real interest. And from every level came the same reframe: this is a health emergency, not just a climate emergency.
Since the screening, one of those suggestions has started to happen: the film is now set to be shown to the Trust’s Board of Directors. It has also been discussed by sustainability leads across the Shelford Group, a collaboration of ten of the largest teaching and research trusts in England, who are aiming to see a screening take place in each of them.
Not everything was hopeful. One person described the groundhog day feeling – this was being said twenty years ago, and here we are, only faster. We can’t smooth that over. But people also said they left encouraged to act, partly because it was so good to hear it said out in the open here.
If you work in healthcare, this is easy to replicate: a room, a screen, and some lead-in time for those with busy agendas. Everything you need – the film, the facilitation guide, a University of Bath questionnaire for attendees, and ways to involve your local MP – is at www.nebriefing.org/peb. The larger plan is a government-backed, televised emergency briefing to the nation, built on screenings exactly like this one.
It is a climate, nature and health emergency. We need our big outside voices now.