Pharmaceutical waste is an important and growing environmental concern. Many drugs have been detected in significant concentrations in waterways, and they are likely to be particularly harmful when "constantly introduced to aquatic ecosystems," such as drugs inappropriately discarded on a daily basis. Environmental contamination with [...]
Health care has significant environmental impact. We performed a scoping review to map what is known about the environmental impact of health care for musculoskeletal conditions.
We must guide civilisation safely through the bottleneck of climate change and species mass extinction, driven by the twin challenges of over-consumption and over-population. Yet guiding this sustainability journey requires enlightenment about our individual and communal carbon footprints from health care. As an outsider to [...]
A radical and immediate engagement of all healthcare staff, particularly those who work in the ICU is necessary to join the race to zero carbon emissions. The following aspects will be crucial: prevention of chronic and acute (e.g. Pandemic) diseases to decrease the need for [...]
Providing anaesthesia for approximately 310 million surgical procedures worldwide every year, and contributing to peri-operative medicine, critical care, and pain management, generates emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and vast amounts of waste. In this paper, we suggest ways that anaesthesia teams can mitigate their environmental [...]
In this era of ‘Choosing Wisely,’ we present a four-step action plan to reduce unnecessary pathology testing and the associated patient harm (blood loss through repeated phlebotomy), economic cost and environmental impact. The authors are experts from the CODA group; a medical education and health-promotion charity that [...]
Within health care, the carbon footprint of hemodialysis (HD) appears to be particularly high, due to both a high use of energy, water, and consumables, and the repeated nature of dialysis treatments. However, studies quantifying this carbon effect are sparse.
Unnecessary testing for levels of vitamin D is costing Australia's healthcare system about $87 million a year and contributing to the sector's carbon footprint, according to Australian researchers. The researchers found in 2020, more than 4.4 million vitamin D tests were funded by Medicare, enough [...]
This is the first study to undertake an adapted triple bottom line assessment of a low-value healthcare activity to explore and make explicit its health, financial and environmental impacts. Our triple bottom line assessment of vitamin D testing highlights that low-value care, which provides little [...]
Clinical practice varies—some is excellent, delivering high quality care, improving health outcomes, and representing excellent value for money. But research over the past two decades has established that a significant minority of clinical care is low value, wasteful, or harmful. At the extreme end of [...]