4.Y.2. PechaKucha: Greening healthcare facilities: barriers, enablers & lessons learnt in European health systems
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Climate change action and sustainability are gaining importance in the health policy discourse. This concerns both anticipating and managing the potential impact of climate change on population health and health systems, but also understanding and mitigating the climate footprint of healthcare itself. The health sector alone is responsible for around 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, of which 17% directly related to activities in health care facilities. There are a range of ways in which the sector and health care facilities specifically can implement change, while also generating co-benefits for population health, including redesigning procurement practices to consider environmental criteria, transforming the physical spaces in which health care is delivered, improving recycling and waste management practices, promoting green mobility options for patients and staff, and empowering the health workforce to embed decarbonization principles in their daily practice, just to name a few. This session aims to showcase existing initiatives that highlight the types of activities that can be implemented to facilitate the greening of health facilities and reduce the climate impact of health care, bringing together a range of perspectives from actors at different levels. This will include a discussion of the support instruments, including funding and technical support, made available by the European Union, which can be accessed by different actors in the sector to facilitate the greening of health facilities. Two relevant examples, the EU-funded initiatives BeWell and Caring Nature, will be featured to demonstrate how European partners are collaborating to reduce the impact of the healthcare sector on the environment. The session will also zoom in to look at initiatives from different national and regional contexts and the lessons they have learnt: presenting the work of the Competence Centre for Climate and Health based at the Austrian National Public Health Institute, which has been working closely with health care facilities towards reaching climate neutrality, and Austria's participation in a multicountry EU project to leverage EU resources for the greening of Austrian health facilities; and discussing a regional good practice example of the health facility group Mutua Terrassa in Catalonia (Spain), which has collaborated with regional authorities and developed a Green Commitment strategy to reduce the environmental impact of its estates. The session foresees active audience participation in discussion with the panel to reflect on enablers and barriers of sustainable action in health care, exploring the different options that policy makers can make use of to drive action at different levels and the role of international support and cross-country learning in making change happen at a time when health systems face many competing challenges and demands. Key messages • Mobilisation is needed across the entire sector and at all levels: from the top down to the health care facility. • A broad range of options and resources exist that can be pursued by decision-makers at different levels to make health care facilities more sustainable.
Authors: Organised by: European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, EUPHA Environment and Health section, Chair persons: Dimitra Panteli (Belgium), Marija Jevtic (EUPHA-ENV)
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,181
OpenAlex ID: W7101438434
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