Remote hospital and GP appointments are “broadly” a good thing because they reduce pollution, the NHS’s eco chief has claimed. MailOnline has more.
Dr. Nick Watts said the health service slashed its carbon emissions by 276 kilotonnes last year “principally” because patients made fewer car journeys.
Thousands of operations were cancelled in 2021 and millions of people delayed coming forward due to fears about Covid. Most GP appointments were moved online or done by telephone.
In comments that risk fuelling a row over face-to-face appointments, Dr. Watts said remote care was “an intervention that should save carbon” going forward.
Britain’s top child doctor also said a wider move to online consultations could benefit poor families who can’t afford to travel during the cost of living crisis.
The comments were made at an annual NHS conference in Liverpool last week, during a talk chaired by Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.
But Dr. Watts, NHS England’s chief Sustainability Manager, admitted hospitals had to do a “better job” at ensuring everyone who wants an in-person consultation can get one.
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What kind of an eco chief is this? He clearly doesn’t give a stuff about the environment or climate change. He had the perfect opportunity to really make the NHS a zero-carbon organisation and has failed miserably.
Online consultations still use electricity, the computers and internet infrastructure needed still use up valuable resources. And of course there will be those pesky people that insist on having an operation carried out in an actual hospital by a doctor who is actually present – which means carbon emissions.
The obvious and only rational solution would be to abolish doctors and the health service altogether. A complete 100% carbon saving from the off, with a stunning additional carbon saving to be expected from the resulting deaths. Incredible, how did this man miss out on such a winning strategy?
On a more serious note, how embarrassing to be him – we slashed emissions by not providing the very essential service we exist to provide. True story: a fellow parishioner at my mum’s church is a GP. In the first wave spring 2020 a patient called with shortness of breath, a tight chect, etc. – the main symptoms of the dreaded covvie. The GP was originally going to give the then standard advice to take some painkillers, stay home and call if things go worse. For whatever reason the GP decided to ask the patient to come in to the practice. Turns out he was having a heart attack. So unless avoidable deaths is what online consultations are intended to achieve, this nonsense idea should receive a big fat no. Some carbon savings could be achieved by firing this moron and all the other useless wasters in the NHS. Putting them on the breadline would undoubtedly reduce their carbon output at least.
Hear, hear.
Obviously the argument is not in goof faith. The NHS chiefs want to train the UK public to get used to online xonsultations because that is what they want for themselves. And they are showing that they will use whatever argument they can conjure to advance their aims.
Those people don’t care about you or their patients or the temperature of the planet. They care about themselves and making their own jobs easier.
And the hot air they spout too.
Well said.
I an starting to think that we are the carbon they want to eliminate.
I hope the gent with the heart attack made a full recovery and the GP saw the light!
Dear Nick Watts,
I would appreciate your publishing of the arithmetic used to substantiate your claim that not offering face-to-face appointments reduced carbon emissions by 276 kilotonnes. Could you please also advise in what way this saving benefited this country, the planet and most importantly, patients?
Regards,
huxleypiggles.
It benefits patients by allowing them to make a contribution to saving the world from climate disaster, obvs. Who would not want to suffer the odd heart attack, a bout of sepsis, maybe lose a limb or two to undiagnosed diabetes? Fail to diagnose a little pre-eclampsia, you might get a two-fer. Totally totally worth it. And the ultimate honour, to pop your clogs while helping the NHS save on carbon emissions – not save lives, no, that is clearly not what the NHS is for. Just as the UK government is not there to serve the citizens of the UK, or the Dutch government to serve the citizens of NL, etc. etc. etc.
What does it take for the average person to see these scamsters for what they are? Useless bloodsucking leeches whose wholesale disappearance from the scene would not even leave a ripple and would undoubtedly see any situation improve.
Your outrage is eloquent abd commendable and comfortably exceeds my efforts but we are indeed on the same page:
“Useless bloodsucking leeches whose wholesale disappearance from the scene would not even leave a ripple and would undoubtedly see any situation improve.”
That’s a sentence to be proud of and a clever use of ‘leeches.’
If you want to see some cracking lines, pop on over to Eugyppius and see his article on the CDC’s minkypox guidance. The article itself has some great lines, but one commenter’s view of the recommendation to masturbate 6 feet apart – “your hand protects me, my hand protects you” – fab.
With that type of humour there may still be some hope for the world.
I reckon the average person will be thanking the nurse as she administers the last dose of midazolam and will draw their last breath convinced daddy state did all it could for them.
First, the NHS did not reduce its carbon but the untreated patients did. If they want to reduce “their” CO2 even further why not close completely (have they in fact done so?) and/or euthenise all who approach them with illness or pregnant in order to make sure the patients’ CO2 output drops.
OOoooops. They might read this and take it as a recommendation.
Don’t worry, they’re working on it
This man is supposedly someone with a background in science and yet it is abundantly clear that he knows absolutely F A about climate and indeed science.
Even before the Scamdemic my opinion of doctors had plummeted but after the last two years I am now firmly convinced that they are by and large myopic and bloody THICK.
They are highly educated, which results in a form of thickness for most who have endured the education grinder.
Doctors are among the most functional compliant beings in the world, trained for years to jump through hoops and get a cookie on the other side.
After all that conditioning and payoff from the system, you think these people have any capacity to think for themselves and are going to rebel against the system? Their biggest skill is pushing to the front of the line twhen a new hoop is presented to show everyone that no one can jump it better than them.
A GP friend of mine said that doctors are no more intelligent than any of the other professionals, they just have to have outstanding memories. He believed his wife to have greater intelligence than he did & that she could run rings round him in a discussion.
He is a Yorkshireman & not very good at obfuscating! A spade is a spade
Now if this genius could give us the numbers for the carbon emissions connected with all the plastic PPE – the pointless aprons, gloves, face rags, the discarded injection needles. How many plastic particles from this stuff will have ended up in the waterways, just counting the use by the NHS? Let’s add the production and transportation cost for this useless garbage while we’re at it. Don’t forget the rise in ambulance call-outs, be they due to covid, undiagnosed ailments or the current mysterious epidemic of young people with heart disease, blood clots or going to sleep and never waking up.
Bloody nailed it yet again Jane.
Great work.
I agree with everything you say except one thing.
I don’t think a reduction in doctors visits result in more deaths, in fact the opposite. At worst I believe it has no effect and more likely even a positive effect, I.e. fewer deaths.
That is obviously not absolutely true. When it comes to the most serious and critical problems I believe doctors have a positive effect.
But otherwise, they over medicate, often under pressure from the patients themselves and in any case contribute very little to long term health improvement because that depends on lifestyle, not medication.
I actually think they know this and know that online consultations will have little to no negative impact
What pisses me off is that they don’t want to scale down the cost of the system. They want to scale down the service. It’s the cheekiness that gets me.
Agreed. We had a woman in the neighbourhood who had a strange muscle spasm disease, included having her throat seize up. Very nice lady, some days okay, some days less so. For a period of about 2 years she was so poorly no one saw her, if she left the house it was in a wheel chair where she had to lay prone and she couldn’t speak above a whisper. I think she had pretty much been written off and was expected not to live for much longer. Then all of a sudden she was walking out and about again, not in great condition, but much better. Turns out some consultant had been using experimental drugs on her and after 2 years of playing Mengele Lives he washed his hands of her and told her to just stop taking whatever poison he had been feeding her. Her own GP had to help her wean off of the stuff. After that she went from strength to strength, it was quite frightening how incredibly ill she had been to then see her regain her strength to be able to live a normal life. I’m not a fan of ambulance chasers, but in this case I really did believe she should have at least filed a formal complaint, the man’s actions were reprehensible.
Unfortunately most people don’t know their own bodies. I avoid doctors as much as I can, take as little of any chemical concoction as I can, but do believe that sometimes both are necessary. But that is because I know if something is really off and needs seeing to, a lot of people just head off to the doc’s for whatever. Undoubtedly part of the reason why people aren’t making enough of a connection with the vaxx. My best friend lives in Spain, she’s unvaxxed, all her friends are vaxxed – all her female friends have had messed up menstruation after the vaxx and not a single one made the connection until they were talking messed up periods and my friend informed them of the studies.
Messed up periods post toxic injection don’t get coverage or if they do, it’s dismissed as ‘women’s problems’ & not worth the bother of investigating.
It was talked about for a while, raised by some highish profile people, but the media didn’t want to pursue it. And as we know if the corporate media doesn’t cover it, the masses won’t believe it’s real.
I could trade medical horror stories with you but won’t bore you.
Your approach seems almost identical to mine. Know my body well, know when something is properly off (which is very very rarely).
A lot is being said and written now about a different approach to health and healthcare, but I’m sure you’l agree it requires some discipline, self-awareness and a willingness to constantly learn. Don’t see too many people up for that. As you say, most seem to prefer the illusion of a quick fix from a doctor.
Regarding your friend whose friends say are all vaxxed, I’m discovering that the number of people who say they are jabbed and the number of people who are actually jabbed seem to be quite different.
People have also been taught that ‘experts’ know things we possibly cannot comprehend. I do not pretend to have the knowledge that comes with studying medicine for years, but many people seem to think that unless you have formally studied something, you can’t have or gain worthwhile knowledge. Know your body, know to recognise something out of the ordinary, know when to seek further assistance and when to heed the advice given and when not. Read the leaflet that comes with drugs – people who have strange symptoms after starting some new drug and who simply never make the connection, unreal. If they had just read the leaflet they would have known.
Re Spain, from what I gather they really were in love with the vaxx. I don’t think they had to use the same type of ‘persuasion’ there that they had to use in other countries like France and even NL. I only just found out that one friend was diagnosed with MS in November. When they were trying to make the initial diagnosis in the hospital, the first question of one of the doctor’s was had she been vaxxed and when. I said I was surprised that that was asked openely.
Most people I know here in NL were vaxxed too, I don’t doubt it. I do see and hear a significant decline in willingness to keep getting shots. People my mum’s church, many in the older cohorts, have got 3 or 4 but are saying no more.
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They have completely forgotten what their purpose is. That’s what happens when you have teams of people working in the organisation who have nothing whatsoever to do with patient care.
There are some advantages to having some technology solution. BP monitoring, blood sugar for Diabetics monitored off your phone, some heart arrhythmias and the like, but this idea is like the endless triage of patients by non-GP’s to filter out serious cases. Its a false assertion that this is somehow better and saves, time and money. It isn’t. It ‘improves things worse’.
Take this case. If my car has a problem in changing gear, what I really want to do it to take it to a top mechanic, Maurice.. He can tell me quickly that the spring has broken in the selector mechanism, and young Charlie can fix it. If I take it to young Charlie, he wont know what the problem is. He may tell me to wash the windows and change my Magic Tree air freshener and come back if it doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t, so I have two more weeks with the problem and Charlie has wasted his time. I go back.
Now Bill, the next one up from Charlie takes a look and says, I think I might be the seat adjustment, I’ll change that and come back in two weeks if it doesn’t work. This goes on a couple more times and finally, by the time I get to see Maurice, the guy who knows gearboxes inside out, it isn’t a spring, but a whole gearbox that needs replacing.
All we have done is to build in several stages where people who have insufficient knowledge for what they are being asked to do, waste their time completely, and allow the situation to deteriorate. The GP, should not be the last resort for people who don’t get better on their own, but the FIRST point of call. A friendly face on a phone screen telling you not to worry, but come back in two weeks time is bloody useless, ineffective and inefficient to the point. It is an absolute insult to anyone who has paid in money to the system. Sick people are now the enemy of the NHS blob.
The 111-service is a nice illustration of that. During some time in 2020 (pre-corona), I was taking beta blockers to cope with adrenaline overemission (generally a silly idea, as these block adrenaline receptors which ultimatively causes the body to emit even more adrenaline). The doctor who prescribed them had told me to take two of them per day, one in the morning and one in the evening. I quickly found out that this wasn’t sufficient and was wondering if I could safely increase the dosis to three pills per day. I then first called my GP where I got an automated out-of-hours replay. As this was sort-of urgent, I tried 111 next. In order to describe the symptoms I had – tremors all over my body and an extremely strong feeling of unrest which made me unable to stop moving – I used the phrase I’m getting terribly agitated. This got me into the psychotic about to go onto a killing spree script (or something like that) and the guy on the phone mercilessly walked me through a 10 minute questionaire relating to near-uncontrollable states of aggression. After having exhausted that, I got another chances to ask the question I had – Can I take three of these pills per day instead of two? The reply was You’ll need to consult your GP about this, we’re not qualified to give this kind of advice.
111 is perfect way to waste time. The call always ends with the advice to go to A & E. Another scam.
Its not known as ‘NHS Re-Direct’ for nothing…
Dr Watts, I respond to your comments with a carbon emission out of my rear end!
… in your general direction!
In summary, we have another crummy civil servant who will say whatever he is told to say in return for a big fat salary funded by taxpayers.
“Dr. Nick Watts said the health service slashed its carbon emissions by 276 kilotonnes last year “principally” because patients made fewer car journeys.”
Any alleged reduction of ‘carbon emissions’ would mainly have been due to the fact staff were constantly playing the covid Hokey Cokey – in / out but mostly out, reducing travel to work. Many staff slavishly tested with the useless sticks. A positive – or a phone ‘contact’ notice – enabled them to stay at home. NHS staff attendance has always been poor.
The ‘reduction’ would have to be offset by the increased manufacture / logistics in the mammoth supply of PPE personal protective equipment – gloves, aprons, the infernal masks, visors, and the ‘testing kits’ – a necessary prop in promoting the covid drama.
We mustn’t forget all the increased – and unnecessary – journeys to the testing and jabbing hubs, too, by the great, unwashed public.
The NHS has a lot to answer for.
So Dr Nick Watts supports sacrificing the lives of people who think they are unwell and need to see a doctor, because that is often what on-line consultations leads to, in order to “reduce carbon.”
I’m glad we understand his priorities.
So why don’t they take all ambulances of the road? Just think how much in emissions they could prevent? Oh, the patient has died, but at least the environment is OK.
NHS: National Hubris Service.
Proud to be protecting the environment.
SURPRISE!!!
(Not!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGhmPbdY7fo
Nick Watts at the WEF…
Our Staff Want To See Us Tackle Climate Change…
course they do…
Perhaps he can start with this?
https://rumble.com/v18py1l-this-is-your-money-9-billion.html
https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/news/uk-rcn-condemns-huge-waste-of-money-spent-on-unusable-ppe-100622
A new report reveals the UK government plans to burn £4bn of PPE that won’t be used in the NHS.
This guy is right. Fewer face to face visits with doctors not only reduced pollution, but saved lives. Doctors kill many people each year by misdiagnosing, prescribing dangerous drugs and and just plain old what we used to call medical negligence. Do yourself a favour, stay out of doctors offices, save tge planet and continue living.
Words fail once again.