Sustainable Healthcare is more than Just Emissions

Lucy Brown joined Circle Health Group in September 2024. She is a registered children’s nurse and an award-winning senior clinical leader, having held a number of director of nursing posts. She has an MSc in critical care nursing specialising in paediatrics and received the Dorothy Clarke award for her thesis on reducing barotrauma in intubated paediatric intensive care patients. Lucy now leads sustainability for Circle Health Group and its UK wide hospital network.

Healthcare will always have a carbon footprint. But there is more to sustainability than just emissions. The change in our climate represents one the greatest threats to global health. As temperatures rise, our patients, some of the most vulnerable in society, will become the most affected. So, how do we manage delivering exceptional care with ensuring a sustainable future for our sector?

Scale of the Challenge

Recent findings show that the healthcare sector contributes 4 percent to the UK’s overall carbon emissions. But emissions are not the whole story. From heatwaves to increased air pollution, our changing climate is now leading to as many as 40,000 people in the UK dying prematurely each year. Air pollution is causing an increase in respiratory conditions, cancers and strokes. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on what living through these traumatic changes is doing to the physical and mental health of patients and healthcare professionals. Focusing on the conversation just on emissions is not enough.

Embedding Change and Susqi

So, what is the solution? As a healthcare professional and registered nurse, Quality Improvement (QI) is in my DNA. I want to use my clinical knowledge and background to propel sustainable innovation at Circle Health Group. Coming up with a solution to how healthcare can become more sustainable is not just the remit of our colleagues in estate management, finance or procurement. As clinicians, nurses and doctors we can make the biggest difference far easier than we think.

Sustainable Quality Improvement “ SusQI for short “is a way of thinking about sustainability and crucially, acknowledging and bridging the skills gap currently impacting the healthcare sector’s ability to drive change quickly. At its core, it asks us to think about the sustainable value of the care we deliver. In short, how can we use the resources available to us to improve the outcomes for our patients in a way that does not harm the planet?

Quality has always been measured in how quickly we can diagnose, treat and improve the quality of life for a patient. SusQI does not change that. Using the Tripple Bottom Line, we can measure not just the benefit to the patient, but also whether the approach to treatment delivers for the wider community and the environment.

In Practice

When I joined Circle Health Group, in September 2024, I was determined to go beyond just emissions management when it came to sustainability. SusQI has become the bedrock of our approach to sustainability. We are equipping our people to lead the innovation for themselves with the knowledge to see and measure the value in real terms. So far, we have already halved our use of nitrous oxide gas as part of a wider push to embed the Intercollegiate Green Theatre Checklist across our UK wide hospital network. Additional projects to reuse walking aids, like crutches, have demonstrated a sustainable cost saving of over £80,000 and further pilot work on chemotherapy drugs is forecasting savings in excess of £1 million. These are small changes demonstrate that sustainability in our sector can do more than just switch off lights.

Conclusion

As we move closer to achieving net zero it would be easy to think, that as sector, we will miss the opportunity to do more than just the sustainable basics. The world doesn’t need more ecologists and environmentalists; it needs everyone in their chosen profession to work sustainably. At Circle, we are demonstrating that sustainabilitys future in healthcare can do so much more. Applying the principles of SusQI is showing that incremental changes, led by clinical teams on the ground, can drive tangible change, benefiting not just the bottom line, but patients and the planet. Together, a sustainable approach to healthcare can mean more than just emissions and start being about whats best for the patients of the future.