Pictured: GP Richard Thomas. Credit Swansea Bay University Health Board
A Swansea Bay GP is practicing what he preaches as he looks after the planet as well as his patients.
Richard Thomas has been a GP at Kingsway Surgery for the past 24 years, and has made subtle differences to improve his fitness and reduce his environmental impact when travelling.
Richard has swapped four wheels for two as he makes his daily 25-minute commute to his practice in Swansea city centre.
Cycling to work, he says, has helped him recuperate following a surgical procedure and boost his fitness, along with cutting his carbon emissions.
Richard said: “As a GP we are always looking to encourage patients to look after themselves as much as possible, and the same goes for myself.
“I’ve looked at what I can do to be more sustainable, and cycling to work was among those options. It’s more environmentally friendly, but it also helped me deal with the post-Covid weight gain and loss of fitness. More recently it’s been part of my rehabilitation after a knee operation last winter – it’s been great at rebuilding muscle strength and knee movement.
“The quick route takes 10 minutes, but I like to go the longer route which is 25 minutes each way. I always feel better for it.”
To ensure his bike is safely secured at work, Richard has also installed bike storage in the surgery using materials that were due to be scrapped.
Thanks to some 6x4foot aluminium sheets donated by his father, Richard got a friend who specialises in welding to build a secure lock-up in the surgery’s underground car park.
It is just another example of his attitude towards sustainability.
Richard added: “Environmental sustainability has been important to me since I’ve been a teenager. During the Covid pandemic I was distraught seeing abandoned PPE in the countryside at the same time that growing warnings about the climate catastrophe were being ignored.
“I felt that we were dealing with one crisis while we ignored or even worsened a much more serious crisis just because its effects were not quite so immediate. Since then, record breaking heatwaves have twice hit us in the UK, wildfires have raged and internationally many people have lost their lives to flooding.
“I want my kids to have a reasonable future and if that’s the case then I need to do what I can to prevent global warming making that impossible.
“I’m trying to make sacrifices. I’ve become vegan in the last two years, because the carbon footprint of dairy products is way higher than of plant-based proteins.
“In work there’s a focus on better asthma management – we have introduced a Maintenance and Reliever Therapy regimen using dry powder inhalers rather than aerosols, we are trying to adopt more lifestyle medicine approaches to managing problems and changing how we deal with waste so we send less to incineration.
“I also teach lots of GP trainees and try to mention environmental sustainability in those teaching sessions, with practical examples of what they can do better. It’s all an ongoing process.”
