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What is sustainable healthcare?
Sustainable healthcare meets our current population’s needs, without damaging the health or ability to meet the healthcare needs of other populations or those in the future.
We all rely on a stable environment, with clean air and reliable supplies of water and food. The global climate and nature crisis increasingly jeopardizes this. To be truly sustainable, healthcare systems must not only think about financial and social impacts; they must stop harming nature and keep within environmental limits too.
The Four Principles
From the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare
The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare (CSH) has developed a set of principles that can guide healthcare practitioners in creating and embedding low carbon practices wherever they are.
1. Prevention
The best way to improve patient care whilst reducing emissions of any illness is to prevent it. Primary Care plays a key role in disease prevention within the health service, and at Greener Practice we believe that Primary Care needs to be focused and funded in a way that supports health promotion and disease prevention more effectively. Primary Care can also play an important role working with local communities ‘upstream’. For example by reducing air pollution, promoting active travel, sustainable healthy food and use of green spaces.
2. Patient empowerment
A Greener Practice approach to good healthcare is one which ensures that decisions are patient-centred. This supports better treatment concordance as well as health awareness and empowerment. There is therefore a good deal of overlap between a ‘green’ approach and agendas such as person-centred care, shared decision making and realistic medicine.
3. Lean Pathways
Clear and appropriate diagnosis; careful consideration of appropriate investigations and treatment; streamlined systems to avoid duplication of care, reduced hospital attendances and avoidance of wasteful practices are all examples of lean systems.
4. Low Carbon Alternatives
We can reduce the carbon footprint of care, with no detriment (and often with benefit) to patients by choosing low carbon alternatives. Examples of this are reusable PPE, reusable surgical instruments and lower impact prescribing options. With some thought, these can also offer us an opportunity to improve care – have a look at our ‘asthma toolkit’ section which explores how low carbon and high quality respiratory care co-exist.