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Sustainability

Carbon reduction plan

Saving lives, saving the planet - GoodSAM Instant On Scene reduces ambulance and air ambulance journeys, saving tens of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ every year.

The Impact of Instant On Scene on CO₂ Emissions

Technology can save more than just lives. In the UK, road traffic accounts for around 5% of air pollution and greenhouse gases [1], 16% of which has been identified to NHS infrastructure and transport [2][3].

Let's look at some more numbers:

UK NHS Ambulance trusts answer more than 10 million 999 calls/year (2017) resulting in ~7,300,000 ambulance journeys/year [4]. That's ~20,000 ambulance journeys a day. There are also around 80 air ambulance missions/day [5].

In each year therefore UK ambulances produce ~228,500 tonnes of CO₂ and air ambulances around 13,700 tonnes of CO₂.

It has been shown that GoodSAM Instant On Scene reduces the need to dispatch an ambulance in 15% of emergency calls [6]. Similar figures have been demonstrated with air ambulance analysis.

Hence, nationally, video could reduce ambulance dispatch by around 3,000 each day and save the lifting of around 12 helicopter missions.

To put that in terms of CO₂ - that's saving 34,000 tonnes of CO₂ from Ambulances and 2,000 tonnes of CO₂ from Air Ambulances each year (a total of 36 million kg).

And this is before we analyse the impact of using GoodSAM in the outpatient setting, reducing the commuting of people attending outpatients appointments.

And there are similar reductions in the Police and other emergency services.

Emergency services CO2 emissions

GoodSAM CO₂ Production

GoodSAM is highly efficient, both in terms of overheads and energy use. Staff work from home (reducing office and commuting energy requirements), and the vast majority of our meetings (promotional and educational) are done online.

Our annual CO₂ production can be broken down into:

Office/Home Office Electricity Usage

4,000 kWh = 1,000 kg CO₂

(offset at source)

Server/Cloud Use

3,520 kg/year

We use Amazon Web Services and our servers in the US and Europe are carbon neutral. In London and Sydney we run 22 servers. It is not possible to get exact figures from AWS but assuming each is 160 kg/year, this totals 3,520 kg/year.

Travel (National and International Meetings)

~15,000 kg CO₂

We average 4 international and 5 national exhibitions each year which equates to ~15,000 kg CO₂.

Our total business CO₂ production is therefore around 20,000 kg CO₂/year (That's about 5 hours of the 34 million kg of CO₂ we save the ambulance service each year).

We offset our CO₂ production mostly at source (e.g. when booking flights or paying for electricity). The remainder we offset at the end of each financial year. Our plan, through the GoodSAM Foundation, is to invest in carbon negative reforestation.

Our carbon reduction plan can be found here.

References

[1] Sustainable Development Unit, 2017

[2] Sustainable Development Unit 2012

[3] Ambulance Emissions Recommendations

[4] Lord Carter of Coles, 2018

[5] Association of Air Ambulances

[6] BioMed Central