The Students Organising for Sustainibility UK (SOS-UK) built the themes of Healthy Lungs for Life into their popular ‘Green Impact for Health’ (GIfH) programme through a digital campaign. GIfH uses an online toolkit of actions to support GP surgeries across the UK to embed sustainability into their operations. Historically, GIfH does not have a strong focus on the links between sustainability and lung health. So, as part of World Lung Day on 25 September, SOS-UK encouraged their participating GPs to raise awareness on the impact of poor air quality on lung health and the actions that everyone can take to reduce air pollution and avoid exposure.

The expected outcomes of GP surgeries completing the action include an increase in knowledge of the impact of poor air quality on lung health and the actions that everyone can take to reduce air pollution and avoid exposure. SOS-UK will continue to highlight the action each World Lung Day, and the comms pack will remain live. The average UK GP surgery has 9,000 registered patients with whom they can potentially share the relevant information, so potentially hundreds of thousands of patients could benefit from the information as a direct result of the action. SOS-UK also hopes to build in similar actions to their other toolkits (for NHS Trusts, universities, dentistry etc.) so it has a further reach than just GPs.

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