As the committee might be aware, we are in the process of establishing a new public health body that will bring together some of the responsibilities of NHS Health Scotland and NHS National Services Scotland, partly to improve our impact on and influence over population-level behaviour change.
However, there are also small things that we can do. For example, one health board—and, unless you press me, I would rather not say which, because I am sure that this is happening in more than one—has a sign in its bicycle park that says, more or less, “You bring your bike at your own risk, and if anything happens to it, that’s not our fault.” I am paraphrasing, of course, but we could encourage people to use bikes by providing a place where they can leave them in safety, giving them an opportunity to padlock them and so on instead of adopting what I would describe as quite a defensive attitude.
Something else that we have sought to do—with rather limited success so far, I have to say, but that does not mean that we will not keep trying—is to provide access to public transport so that people do not have to use their cars to get to hospitals and other facilities. I accept here and now that that has not yet been a resounding success, but we need to get better at it.
We also need to maximise the use of technology so that people do not have to travel to get access to health and care services. For example, people in Cumnock with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—or heart and lung disease—have been provided with facilities that allow them to be treated from a distance. That means that they do not have to come to hospital, which not only is good for them but saves on travel and emissions.
As I said, our sustainability action plan has just been launched. Part of it is about providing people with supporting tools and programmes that allow boards to baseline themselves in terms of not just what they are doing with their buildings and the other infrastructure elements that I have mentioned but our overall progress with regard to the Scottish national performance framework and the United Nations sustainable development goals. That matters; NHS Scotland employs approximately 163,000 people in Scotland, which means that we have a huge reach with regard to both the people whom we treat and the people whom we employ, and if we are not demonstrating exemplary behaviours ourselves, it is quite hard for us to persuade the rest of the population when we say that they should take more exercise.
This is about being not only an exemplar employer but an exemplar in how we design and build things, and we could say more about how we are saving public funds by adopting more sustainable approaches to delivering services. For example, Girvan community hospital in the NHS Ayrshire and Arran area was designed to minimise environmental impact. Without going into too much detail—although I can, if the committee so wishes—I can tell you that there will be a 3 per cent reduction in Ayrshire and Arran’s CO2 emissions, simply because of what we have done in that one hospital. It is really important that the public understands that we are taking this seriously in the services that we provide and in the way that we design and build things.