Our sustainability team measures and reports on our environmental impacts and develops initiatives to improve the sustainability of the organisation and its supply chain.

The team works across the organisation to help and advise colleagues on how they can work more sustainably and provide training and guidance on sustainability topics.

We've been working on our sustainability agenda since 2017, when we committed to a company-wide Sustainability Plan. You can see some of our results from this period in our sustainability annual reports.

In 2017, we determined that our baseline year should be 2013/14 for reporting purposes, and so from that year until 2021 we have reduced our:

• carbon footprint by 65%
• overall travel by 99%
• water usage by 52%
• paper usage by 97%

These fantastic numbers can be attributed in part to our move to remote working during the pandemic from 2020 onwards. Therefore, for the next reporting period of 2021/22 the Sustainability Programme has challenged itself to develop a methodology to calculate the 'real' impact of remote/hybrid working by measuring what is missing from the data above such as home heating and electricity usage. 

We have already started on the path to embedding sustainability into our digital initiatives. Our digital sustainability case studies provide detail on:

• NHS Digital Call/Recall COVID-19 Vaccinations Programme
• Provision of MS Teams to the NHS
• NHSmail for care homes
• NHS App
• National Booking Service (NBS) – Book a Coronavirus Vaccination
• Find my NHS Number

As we continue on our sustainability journey, we will focus on how NHS Digital can further embed sustainability across the organisation, from its digital services to its supply chain, and the important role we can play in enabling the health and care sector to achieve their sustainability goals.

NHS Digital’s sustainability staff network is called Green Digits. This is a network for sustainability-minded staff to connect through online sessions, meetings, events, and action days. 

The network is driven by its members and supported by the sustainability team to ensure its activities and agendas remain both relevant and useful to its members.