We are delighted to announce the NHS Integrated Care Board for Cheshire and Merseyside was highly commended in the 2024 Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Health and Care Analytics.

The award, named after the Society’s first female fellow and pioneer of data visualisation, celebrates data analysts in the UK health and care sector whose work has delivered better health outcomes.

Now in its fifth year, the award is supported by the Health Foundation, an independent charitable organisation working to build a healthier UK.

Charles Tallack, director of data analytics at the Health Foundation, commenting on this year’s winners, said: ‘The effective use of data and analytics is crucial to improving the health and care system. These two winning projects are excellent examples of ambitious collaborations that improved health and care by harnessing data in innovative ways. Each team meaningfully involved and engaged patients and the public in their work and published a wealth of information and resources in easily accessible forms. These impactful pieces of work are brilliant examples of how data analysts are tackling real-world problems and benefiting patients. Congratulations to both teams.’

We were proud to lend some knowledge to this highly successful event, held in Birkenhead Town Hall, and supported by Liverpool World Centre, Inter Climate Network, Wirral Council’s Climate Emergency team, and Wirral Environmental Network. Deputy Mayor, Councillor Brian Kenny, also attended and provided his reflections, along with a closing address.

COP (Conference of the Parties) delivers the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference. All States that are Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are represented at the COP, at which they review the implementation of the Convention and any other legal instruments that the COP adopts and take decisions necessary to promote the effective implementation of the Convention, including institutional and administrative arrangements.

Delegates Agreeing the Agenda

This year, Wirral primary schools were invited to deliver their own “Mock COP” in anticipation of “COP 29” taking place in Baku this coming November. Year 5 pupils attended as delegates, each representing a real COP member. In total, we welcomed delegates representing Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, The European Union, and The Marshall Islands. Each group brought with them a wealth of knowledge, providing updates on climate progress, and fielding questions from one another, before delving into a workshop looking at “dream” aspirations, and realistic ambitions for moving towards Net Zero.

Questions for the Panel

Our Dominic Griffiths was on hand, as part of a panel of experts, who also had the opportunity to answer any technical questions from the delegates. Here are the two he answered within the ‘Energy’ theme:

1) How much electricity does Wirral use in a year?

This is a true “stumper” as, despite working in the field of energy efficiency for 15+ years, this isn’t the kind of information Dominic knows off the top of his head. Thankful for the lunch break taking place in between the questions being posed, and answers being required, he created an estimate of 386,780,400 kilowatt hours (kWh), or 386.78 gigawatt hours (gWh) for Wirral’s residential electrical usage, based on the average per household currently being 2,700kWh per annum, and there being 153,252 Wirral households (according to a quick internet search). This figure is of course far too big to mean anything in real terms. However, Dominic also remembered being taught by Doc Brown in the film “Back to the Future,” that the DeLorean time machine required an input of 1.21gW, which could only be provided by a bolt of lightning. There are 366 days in 2024, so 386.78gWh is 1.06gWh per day, so it’s roughly a bolt of lightning per day, which is much easier to imagine. If only we could harness them!

2) Why do countries still burn fossil fuels?

This insightful question was asked by several delegates, who had learned all the negatives about continued fossil fuel use, and were wholly onboard with the message that we must stop extracting fossil fuels to reach our international climate targets. So why do people still use them?

After a quick spell thinking up a useful analogy, and bearing in mind that Wimbledon had just started, which always reminds Dominic that strawberry season is upon us, he posed this question back to the delegates: “Imagine you have a strawberry bush in your back garden, and you love eating strawberries. Whenever you want, you can help yourself to as many strawberries as you like, and then I come along, telling you you’ve got to stop eating strawberries, and you’ve got to start buying raspberries from me instead. And I charge you £1 per raspberry.” None of the delegates seemed pleased with this prospect, so Dominic explained that for many countries – especially those still using coal – fossil fuels are easy, cheap and have been part of their country’s infrastructure for decades, if not 100+ years. Moving away from fossil fuels requires new knowledge, and financial investment.

Perhaps the best moment of the day came right at the end, when the delegates from Azerbaijan thanked us all for attending their COP, and wished us safe journeys home. We look forward to watching how COP 29 unfolds in Baku, and how closely our session mirrors the real one.

To learn more about how we might be able to support with climate change/energy efficiency/fuel poverty/net zero education with schools, drop us a line here: info@epplus.org.