Wards, clinics and offices at Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital have been fitted with new LED lighting to reduce the impact of Hull’s hospitals on the environment.

Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (HUTH) has introduced 20,000 LED light fittings at both hospitals and hospital buildings across East Yorkshire to cut its energy bill.

The major relighting project, overseen by HUTH’s capital team, began in December 2020 and has just been completed.

Marc Beaumont, Head of Sustainability, said the LED lighting switch was part of HUTH’s Zero Thirty campaign, launched in the summer, to be a UK leader in tackling the NHS’s impact on climate change.

He said: “We’ve set ourselves the ambitious target of becoming the first hospital trust in England to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030.

“The completion of the lighting project next month means our plans are gathering pace. We have said we will not stand by and do nothing and this is just the first project of many that will be undertaken by the trust over the next nine years.”

Other projects include the insulation of roofs and external walls to reduce heating loss, the use of wind and solar power to general electricity and the replacement of gas-fired boilers with air source heat pumps.

These projects focus on one of our largest source of emissions, the buildings that we occupy. However, we’re looking at how we can reduce carbon emissions from everything we do, how we treat our patients, the drugs we use and how we travel to work.

HUTH is also constructing a solar panel field in Cottingham that will to generate all of Castle Hill hospital’s day-time energy needs during the summer months.