N3's opportunity to reduce the NHS carbon footprint

N3 in the network

Reducing the core from 57 Points of Presence (POP's) to 10 could reduce current energy levels by 80%, saving 1,100 tonnes of CO2 per annum, and deliver additional energy savings of 1.9m Kwh saving £190K per year.

Refresh of 12,000 routers on N3's catalogue services could realise energy savings of 11m Kwh saving over £1.1m per year and 4,800 tonnes of CO2, this equates to almost 50% of the current energy level.

Further benefits:

Reduced travel time for maintenance and commissioning engineers
A rationalised infrastructure could provide fewer points of failure

N3 at the home

There are 15,452 VPN Tokens in use, enabling staff to remain connected to central applications and e-mail when away from their normal place of work, or working from home.

If 25% of staff were to use their VPN Token for one day per week for working from home, it would save over 138,812 days of staff commuting travel per year, this could save 5.4m Km of staff travel and 773 tonnes of CO2 .

N3 in the community

Replacing all paper prescriptions with Electronic Transmission Prescriptions this could save 4,197
tonnes of paper per year (this is equivalent to around 100,000 Trees) and 14,100 tonnes of CO2 savings per year.

N3 provides access to the one million images that are stored electronically every single day (PACS), providing savings on film, transport and staff costs, including a saving to the NHS of £50m on film processing, and trusts around 1million litres of water per year.

N3 in the hospital

The NHS Sustainable Development Unit have reported that NHS staff, patients and visitors travel 10.4 Billion Km per year. If Video Conferencing was used for just 30 hours per week in each large trust it could deliver travel savings of £57m (additionally this could also save upto 2.3m working hours) per year and 7,200 tonnes of CO2.