Saving Lives, Saving the Planet...
The Impact of GoodSAM Instant-On-Scene on Carbon Dioxide 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
13.7 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 Clinic.co and 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.
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:
4000 KWH = 1000Kg CO2 (offset at source)
Server/Cloud Use:
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 160Kg/year, this totals 3520Kg/year.
Travel (National and International Meetings):
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 20,000Kg CO2/year (That's about 4 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:
