Low Flow Anaesthesia Success Reduces St Peter’s Vets’ Carbon Footprint
St Peter’s Vets, a four-branch first opinion small animal practice in Hampshire that is part of VetPartners, achieved its Silver Level iiE Accreditation in June 2024 after achieving Bronze Level a year earlier. A big push for the practice this year was the focus on reducing anaesthetic gas usage, partly through low flow anaesthesia, after seeing that this contributed 20% of the practice’s carbon footprint in 2022. Through changes in protocols, investing in CPD sessions for the whole team, and by supporting education of staff, the practice succeeded in driving down anaesthetic gas consumption by almost 14% in just one year. The Green Champion, Ella Townsend, explained the steps the team took to achieve this.
How Did the Practice Collect Data on Anaesthetics Usage?
“We set up a green team in 2022 and were shocked at the level of impact that our anaesthetic gas usage was having on the environment when we started measuring it: it was about 20% of our total carbon footprint. We initially focused on quantifying the usage and establishing systems to ensure this was being recorded monthly. We measure the number of bottles ordered each month of the two types of anaesthetic gas that we use (we keep a certain number in stock and only order when needed). This data is tracked across all three branches that carry out anaesthetics. Our anaesthetic gas consumption generated 11.19 tonnes CO2e during our Bronze audit year.”
How Did St Peter’s Vets Achieve the Reduction?
“Working towards our Silver accreditation involved us making an action plan to reduce our anaesthetic gas consumption. We could do this by adopting the practice of low flow anaesthesia, reducing length of anaesthetics, and increasing our use of analgesia to reduce the anaesthetic gas requirement.
Low flow anaesthesia involves reducing the flow of oxygen and therefore the amount of agent picked up and delivered to the patient; this can only be safely carried out with the assistance of certain pieces of monitoring equipment and adequate staff training. We had an external provider come in to teach all the staff involved in anaesthetics, and created helpful cheat sheets for us to use daily.
We changed our pre-medication protocols to involve more pain relief agents to reduce our anaesthetic need and we have made a real effort as a team to reach for analgesic agents rather than increasing the anaesthetic gas flow. We carried out a clinical audit if adding ketamine into our bitch spay protocols helped reduce our anaesthetic gas consumption: it did, so we now routinely give it to all bitch spays. We have also made an effort to increase our use of regional anaesthetics by using more nerve blocks and local anaesthetic techniques to reduce the need for inhaled anaesthetic agents.
Our final step was to look at ways we could reduce the length of anaesthetics. This involved things like trying to prepare the animal as much as possible before we induced anaesthetics by clipping, and part cleaning the surgical site if the animal was comfortable with this, as well as setting up equipment, especially for our laparoscopic surgery, before the animal was induced.”
Successfully Reducing Anaesthetic Gas Usage
Through completion of the iiE Silver Level audit process, the practice evidenced a brilliant reduction in level of emissions associated with its anaesthetic gas usage. This reduced from 11.19 tonnes of CO2e at the Bronze Audit to 9.64 tonnes of CO2e: a decrease of 1.55 tonnes of CO2e. The team will continue to apply these techniques as the practice works towards achieving Green Level iiE accreditation.
For more information on St Peter’s Vets: www.stpetersvets.co.uk
To contact the practice: contactus@stpetersvets.co.uk
Learn more about low flow anaesthesia from a past webinar event here. Check out our events page for more upcoming events.