Appraising the sustainability of care pathways is seen as a crucial step to enabling health systems undergoing transformative global change to adapt to the needs of patients and communities, with increasing pressure to be financially, socially and environmentally sustainable. To facilitate the completion of care pathway assessments, it is necessary to generate data that characterises the impact of the common care pathways activities. In generating these data, valuable insight is provided into the environmental hotspots associated with each activity.

AstraZeneca UK Limited sponsored just such an environmental assessment at St Joseph’s Hospital, located in Hamilton, Canada for the purpose of facilitating care pathway assessments and to assist St Joseph’s in understanding its environmental impact. As well as providing insight into the overall hospital’s footprint, the study appraised the environmental impact of activities undertaken by six clinical departments in St Joseph’s.

AstraZeneca UK Limited and their technical partner, ERM Limited have worked with Sustainable Healthcare Coalition to make data and insights from the study available in the case study and supplementary clinical department documents presented here.