One of the highlights of my week has been speaking to Yasmina Hamdaoui, a pharmacist working in Ysbyty Gwynedd. Yasmina is one of the founding members of the Green Group in her hospital and a guiding light behind the Green Health Wales network, which launches later this month.
Yasmina was born in Pwlhelli to Algerian and Scottish parents and studied at Liverpool John Moores University before moving to work in Bangor. She credits the beauty she sees in the beaches and mountains of North Wales as one of the reasons she became interested in planetary health.
As a pharmacist, she brings a particularly valuable perspective to the sustainable healthcare agenda. Drugs and pharmaceuticals are the single biggest source of emissions in the NHS and make up 23% of the NHS carbon footprint (Carbon Trust 2018/19).
The Green Group was the result of frontline clinicians meeting to work out how they make their hospital more sustainable. They designed a form for their peers to complete, which harvested a range of ideas that fed into a project bank. The multidisciplinary group was formed because of a Bevan Exemplar project and soon found that there were projects underway, about which they had previously been unaware. They started publishing leaflets and posters and holding events.
As the group started meeting, they were curious that their senior colleagues, including a number of consultants, gave them complete control and declined to take any of the leadership roles. Yasmina sees this is a crucial step in their development. With the support and encouragement of their seniors the group grew in confidence.
A second leap forward occurred following the three-day Spread and Scale Academy organised by the Improvement and Innovation team at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. Here, Yasmina and her colleagues learned about themselves and their peers and the mindset they needed to expand their enterprise. The focus on power sharing, personal development and work-place culture helped the Green Group to become better organised, more ambitious, and more cohesive as a team.
Yasmina says, “Spread and Scale didn’t just help with the Green Group. The principles we worked through are genuinely applicable to both personal and professional life and any innovation project.”
Using the skills they had learned from the Spread and Scale Academy, by Spring 2021, the Green Group had expanded their network and joined up with other sustainable healthcare leaders, including colleagues at Cardiff and Vale. Together, they decided to put a name to their network. Thus, the Green Health Wales Network was born, and its inaugural conference is to be launched at the end of June 2021. This has the potential to transform sustainable healthcare across Wales and already has buy-in from every health board across Wales.
Yasmina’s story is a wonderful example of what can happen when young leaders are given the space and support to grow by more senior leaders. With passion and purpose, they are building a network which has the ability to transform the way we understand and practise sustainable healthcare in Wales.
As I write this, the Government’s response to the Coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths Report has just been published. This follows the remarkable inquest into the tragic death of Ella Kissi-Debrah in 2013. Ella and her family lived just 25 metres from South Circular Road in Lewisham, south-east London, where levels of nitrogen dioxide air pollution from traffic was given as a cause of death by the Coroner, leading to calls for legally binding levels of particulate pollution to be lowered to meet the WHO limits.
The death of an otherwise healthy nine year-old girl, as a consequence of toxic air, raises profound questions about the nature of human beings and their place in the scheme of things. When the natural systems, of which we are a part, and on which we depend become poisoned through human action, then a wholesale recalibration of our relationship with the planet is called for.
With the quality of air in parts of Cardiff amongst the worst in the UK, and with growing evidence linking it to disease, Yasmina’s work and the mission of Green Health Wales couldn’t be more important.
