Install Pop-Up Cycleways, NHS Bosses Urge U.K. Councils

The chief executive of St. Bartholomew’s hospital in central London has written to Islington Council urging the installation of pop-up cycleways and widened sidewalks because, during the COVID-19 pandemic, “hospital staff are increasingly switching to walking and cycling to work.”

CEOs from two other hospitals have also written letters to their councils as part of a coordinated effort to create safe routes for NHS staff.

The “Key Workers Need Streetspace” campaign was created by NHS doctors.

Bart’s CEO Professor Charles Knight wrote that “heavy traffic” was a “blight,” and that “infrastructure for active travel enables people to exercise as part of their daily routine.”

Professor Knight, an eminent heart surgeon, also reminded his local council that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has “told regional leaders to encourage people to commute on foot or by bike.”

The NHS has a workforce of 1.7 million, making it the largest employer in the U.K. and the fifth largest in the world. Bart’s alone has 16,000 staff.

The Key Workers Need Streetspace campaign wants CEOs at other NHS trusts to put pressure on councils around the U.K.

The campaign says that without the installation of safe routes to work “we risk the car becoming the default mode of socially-distanced transport and non-car owners (half of the UK population) may have to choose between expensive private hire vehicles, crowded public transport or braving the newly-trafficked streets.”

Key Workers Need Streetspace was co-founded by Jonathan Kelly, a divisional manager at the Barts Health, and Rob Hughes, a clinical research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Hughes is also one of the founders of Lower the Baseline, a doctor-led active travel campaign to reduce the demand on the NHS by the coronavirus pandemic.

One of the other founders was Sunil Bhopal, a clinical lecturer in population health pediatrics at Newcastle University. 

Bhopal, who is also an honorary assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, wants speed limits to be lowered to encourage active travel.

He was coauthor of a March 24 blog in the British Medical Journal calling for several emergency public health interventions to prevent the NHS from becoming overwhelmed by COVID-19. 

“First, we suggest an immediate reduction in motor vehicle speed limits,” argued Bhopal. 

Lower the Baseline is a “space that explores ambitious public health interventions to lower the rates of admission to intensive care units and other over-stretched departments in the healthcare system.”

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents are among the bodies that support such measures, said Bhopal and his coauthors.

CEOs from Whipps Cross Hospital and the Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust have written to their local councils following guidance from Key Workers Need Streetspace. A campaign spokesperson said more hospital CEOs will be writing to local councils “soon.”