Sustainable Healthcare
The World Health Organization has described climate change as “the defining health challenge of our time”. This section looks at improvement work on environmental sustainability and the principles of sustainable healthcare.
RCPCH are focusing efforts on placing the impact on health at the heart of climate change activity. We are strengthening our relationships with stakeholders who are collectively advocating on behalf of health institutions through our membership of the UK Healthcare Alliance on Climate Change.
There is personal action that individuals can make to influence change, and we can all play our part. We recognise that collective action on climate change needs to be balanced against the current pressures healthcare professionals face in driving forward improvements in child health.
Through coordinated action, we can maximise our impact to protect children’s health.
The Sustainability in Quality Improvement framework (SusQI) developed by the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare and partners is an approach to improving healthcare in a holistic way, by assessing quality and value through the lens of a “triple bottom line”. In SusQI, the health outcomes of a service are measured against its environmental, social and economic costs and impacts to determine its “sustainable value”.
Watch Dr Frances Mortimer, Medical Director of the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare’s lecture on Sustainability in Quality Improvement for the University of Toronto from April 2019 below: