A Bridport doctor has been praised and recognised for his outstanding contribution to health.

David Pencheon has been awarded a British Medical Journal award.

He was the founding director of the Sustainable Development Unit (SDU) for NHS England and Public Health England, set up to look at the carbon footprint of healthcare back in 2007.

Mr Pencheon said: “The initial question was what should the NHS be doing as their part in this crisis and when I assumed the directorship, I thought we need to do something quite concrete, so why don’t we do something no other country has done and that’s measure the organisational footprint of the whole NHS, which is what we did.

“The take home message was we have a wider obligation than just providing healthcare.”

He said the unit has gone from ‘strength to strength’ with the chief executive, Simon Stevens, setting a target for the NHS to be net zero carbon ‘well before 2050’.

Mr Pencheon added: “What I would like it to achieve is to be a demonstrator that a large organisation can be a leader in the transition to a safe, secure and fair future, rather than a follower.

“We do it in the NHS because it is a health issue and we want to set an example to others. What we do in the NHS is able to normalise things in the wider society.”

Mr Pencheon qualified as a doctor at Oxford University and went on to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and moved into public health medicine. He was joint director of public health in north Cambridgeshire, a public health training director with the NHS research and development programme and director of the Public Health Observatory in Cambridge until 2007.

He left the SDU in January 2018 and is now an honorary professor at the Medical and Health School at the University of Exeter and lives in Bridport.

On winning the award he said: “It’s great, I feel it’s good as it raises the profile of the issue and like all these awards you accept it on behalf of thousands of unsung heroes. It gives a bit of official recognition to people working beyond the call of duty, which a lot of people in the NHS do.

“I think it is particularly good for Bridport because I also see Bridport as quite a front foot. What impresses me is it shows you what experience there is in the semi-retired folk in Bridport charting the way forward.”