Diary of a Sustainability Manager
Diary of a Sustainability ManagerKatarina McCartney
Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Addenbrooke's Hospital.
Addenbrooke's Hospital has been reported in the media as having the highest parking charges in the UK, and perhaps as a consequence has one of the lowest single occupancy car use for staff commuting to work, and high levels of walking and cycling.
Monday 19th October
Started out-of-the-norm by taking the bus to work, I have got to my desk to find a sky-high pile of returns to this year's Cambridge Travel for Work (TfW) Survey. I thought, since a large number of our staff is not regular computer users, it would be beneficial to provide hard copies, but now I have to spend the morning inputting all the results! Still, at least we will have lots of good data. Tonight I sat at home and watched David Attenborough's Life (go pebble toad!) while inputting some more of the surveys.
Tuesday 20th October
Back on my bike today for a much more enjoyable commute to work......and still they come, more inputting this morning! I opened my emails to see that it's good news for one of our members of staff today. He registered for Camshare a couple of months Diary of a travel planner ago and now car shares from St Ives. He won an ‘Essential Car Safety Pack' and is very pleased, I have written a little piece for our intranet to publicise the benefits of car sharing, hopefully it will encourage more people to sign up, and it might even help capture those who already, unofficially share. I am also organising the next BUG-WAG (Bicycle User Group and Walking Action Group) meeting today and am hoping to coincide this with a meeting with someone from the Cambridge Cycling Campaign to discuss site access issues. We have a huge cycling staff base here at the hospital and therefore there is never enough cycle parking. Although we are always adding more, the issue still remains. Cambridgeshire City Council have kindly donated us 110 cycle stands, so we have been strategically placing them around the site, and, having located a few more potential areas today, we should soon have them all in, every extra stand really helps on this site! I cycled home a different route this morning, a change of scenery and a bit of extra exercise.
Wednesday 21st October
Cycled into work and locked my bike on one of the new stands which have been put in recently.
Since my post is not just regarding travel management, today I have been considering ways to more accurately measure our entire carbon footprint -from travel (both business and commute) energy, waste and from procurement - quite a huge but important task! In my lunch break I popped down to see our weekly bicycle surgery and got my brakes changed. Opportunities Without Limits, known as OWL, is a charity that runs a range of community based projects providing work opportunities for people with a range of disabilities or disadvantages. One of their specialties is bike repair and refurbishment. So they also sell bikes on our site and we donate our abandoned bikes to them too, it's a really great arrangement. I had a meeting this afternoon with a colleague from the IT department to start to understand how we could ensure we are not wasting energy unnecessarily through IT. Tomorrow is a day off.
Friday 23rd October
This morning I have been preparing for a presentation I will be giving this afternoon in Cambridge, for the Cambridge Climate Change Charter Expo 2009 on the ‘Access to Addenbrooke's Travel Plan'. Even though Cambridge is relatively small (and luckily flat), I still have to get out my cycle map of Cambridge to work out how best to get to the meeting, which is on the other side of Cambridge. I make it to the event, which is at the SmartLife center, with enough time to change back into my smarter, but not cycle friendly, clothes. It was a great event, it is always great to meet people working on the same agenda specifically those in the same city and also a really nice lunch was provided.
