WITH 8,900 staff and more than 1.5 million people using its sites every year York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust faces a challenge managing its annual 4.7 million business miles.

Through its continuous encouragement of greener and more sustainable forms of patient and staff travel, the Trust has entered the Best Sustainable Travel Initiative award.

The Trust has established a Travel and Transport Group covering York, Scarborough and Bridlington to review all aspects of travel including public transport, cycling, taxi journeys, car parking, hire cars and pool car.

This year one of the key initiatives for the group was to improve staff travel options and reduce personal travel for business.

Previously York staff have used their own vehicles for travel on work business, which proved costly to the Trust and with no guarantee as to the safety or efficiency of the vehicles being used.

As part of its travel strategy to improve safety and reduce costs, a new fleet of ten Car-share vehicles are now available for York Hospital staff to use on business.

The scheme also provides the Trust with a daily car rental scheme. The cars produce low levels of CO2 emissions reducing the Trust’s overall carbon footprint.

Mandy Chambers, Facilities Management secretary with the Trust said: "By allowing staff access to these hire vehicles it encourages them to use alternative methods of transport such as walking or cycling to travel to work knowing that they will then be able to still travel to the East Coast sites whilst reducing parking numbers for staff and the Trust’s carbon footprint.

"The scheme has just commenced and already staff are responding positively."