The past decade has seen encouraging commitments from health system leaders, professional societies and industry to identifying environmentally sustainable practices that can be built into the future of healthcare. Making these commitments a reality will require accurate ways of measuring the environmental impact of health interventions, as well as transparent decision-making frameworks to guide how we integrate these environmental considerations into our choices around care delivery.
This has implications across the entire spectrum of decisions related to health interventions. To date, these discussions have been most prominent within the health technology assessment (HTA) community and several HTA agencies have already included environmental impact in their assessments. Many methodological questions remain, however, as currently there is no universally agreed methodology for measuring environmental considerations.
It is against this background that the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition developed a recently published discussion paper, “Building environmental considerations into the evaluation of health interventions: taking a care pathways approach” in partnership with Novo Nordisk, GSK, Sanofi, Roche, Bupa and The Health Policy Partnership. The paper focuses on recognising the need to accurately measure the environmental impact of health interventions, and to build this into choices around care delivery.
The paper aims to stimulate open discussion between all stakeholders on how to make healthcare more environmentally sustainable, reward innovation and advance best-practice care for all. It argues that taking a whole systems care pathways approach is critical if we are to balance achieving the best health outcomes whilst minimising their environmental impact. Achieving the best health outcomes should always come first, but how do we build that into our decision-making? If healthcare is ultimately about maximising health outcomes, how do we factor in the climate crisis into the choices that we make today? The time has come to redefine what we mean by value in healthcare to include environmental impact.
The Coalition then continued the conversation started by the paper by hosting a webinar on 7th May for a broad range of stakeholders. We invited the authors of the aforementioned paper to share their perspectives on these issues and to discuss how we can work together in healthcare on how to make environmental impact matter. Watch below: