Dear HCWH Europe members, partners, colleagues, and stakeholders,
As 2018 draws to a close I’d like to take this opportunity to say how delighted I am to be joining HCWH Europe as Executive Director and would like to give you a brief overview of my background and share with you my aspirations and ambitions for the coming year.
I join HCWH Europe following nine years working as a sustainable healthcare practitioner in the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Putting policy into practice – I worked with hospitals and healthcare providers to reduce carbon emissions and waste, and help create ethical and resource efficient supply chains to improve health and wellbeing for staff and patients. The Care Without Carbon programme I developed with my team, continues to be very successful and is being adopted by a growing number of NHS providers as the basis of their sustainability programmes.
HCWH Europe has a critical role to play, not only in providing a collective voice for the healthcare sector, but to build strong networks and to mobilising action towards shared goals - I hope to expand our activities and networks in 2019 and beyond. Key areas of opportunity for us will be low carbon healthcare and sustainable procurement, as well as building on our existing programmatic work on pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and food.
I’d like to thank the HCWH Europe team for all their continued hard work and commitment -as well as advancing our programmatic work the team organised a very successful CleanMed Europe (in partnership with Radboud university medical center who also deserve our thanks). I’m looking forward to working with everyone in the team and our growing network of members in the years ahead.
On behalf of all of the team here at HCWH Europe I’d like to wish you a happy holidays and a very productive (and sustainable!) 2019.
Will Clark
HCWH Europe Executive Director