A multi-stakeholder perspective on sustainable healthcare: From 2030 onwards (original) (raw)

Design for Sustainable Healthcare in a European context

Proceedings of The 4th International Virtual Conference on Advanced Scientific Results, 2016

In recent years, interest in Sustainable Healthcare has grown globally: many environmental issues are attracting great interest because they also represent a high cost for National Health Services. Resource consumption and waste production have huge environmental and economic impacts, deeply affecting the costs of medical treatments. Much research in recent years has focused on education and policy strategies to face these issues, but Design research could play a key role to integrate them, acting upstream the production process. This study aims to provide an overview on different European approaches to Sustainable Healthcare and Design for Healthcare, defining potentials and limitations to their development. The developed methodology combines two different levels of analysis, including macro (region) and micro (hospital and wards) environmental issues. The analysis has been applied to three different European case studies (from Italy, Sweden and Denmark). This allowed to highlight pros and cons of current international scenarios in regards of Sustainable Healthcare and Design strategies and their implementation.

Sustainable Healthcare - A National Swedish Innovation Agenda

2015

For the past year a constellation of different stakeholders have been working with a National Swedish Innovation Agenda on Sustainable Healthcare. Numerous meetings, workshops and interviews have been conducted to sort out what actions need to be implemented so that Sustainable Healthcare can grow and become a bigger part of the Swedish innovation, economy and export. This short English version of the Innovation Agenda summarizes the definition of sustainable healthcare, key stakeholders of sustainable healthcare, a SWOT-analysis of the field, principle conclusions resulting from the work with the Agenda, results of the work (the Nordic Center for Sustainable Healthcare), as well as the main contributors and methodology of the Agenda

Sustainable Healthcare: A path to sustainability

Iiiee Master Thesis, 2012

Sustainable healthcare is becoming an increasingly prominent issue as the aspects and impacts of healthcare activities are acknowledged and discovered. However, 'sustainable healthcare' is a debatable concept, without consensus and used in a variety of ways by many organizations. This research project lays a foundation for working consistently with the concept. Traditional and modern performance measurements are combined to form the basis of a framework that supports criteria for levels in reaching sustainable healthcare. The concept of stakeholder theory and engagement further supports the formation of the framework with levels of stakeholder involvement and thus quality of action. Literature reviews and leaders from the sustainable healthcare field provided information that contributed to the organization of sustainability levels and hierarchy of criteria. Analysis and careful consideration of information provided by these sources aided in the creation of a guideline for a path to 'sustainable healthcare' and clarifies how healthcare facilities might operationalise the 'sustainable healthcare' concept.

Creating sustainable health care systems

Journal of Health Organization and Management, 2018

Purpose In order to create sustainable health systems, many countries are introducing ways to prioritise health services underpinned by a process of health technology assessment. While this approach requires technical judgements of clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness, these are embedded in a wider set of social (societal) value judgements, including fairness, responsiveness to need, non-discrimination and obligations of accountability and transparency. Implementing controversial decisions faces legal, political and public challenge. To help generate acceptance for the need for health prioritisation and the resulting decisions, the purpose of this paper is to develop a novel way of encouraging key stakeholders, especially patients and the public, to become involved in the prioritisation process. Design/methodology/approach Through a multidisciplinary collaboration involving a series of international workshops, ethical and political theory (including accountability for reaso...

Building a Sustainable Healthcare Model: A Cross-Country Analysis

Sustainability

This paper aims to advocate for a sustainable healthcare system and the need for pursuing a new set of goals in designing it, given the current challenges in European Union (EU28). The EU28 member states are in different phases of economic integration, and yet far from an authentic integrated market. Despite the real gains in other domains, such as commercial and competition, public health is very different across the EU28 space and lacks a common integrated and sustainable approach. Herein a sustainable healthcare model is introduced and is based on four components, two for the inputs and two for the outputs of the healthcare system, each component being further categorized into two factors. The method consists of the assessment of a new and suggestive common index of sustainable healthcare (ISH). The methodology consists of five steps: data gathering, data validation, normalization of data by applying the utilities theory, aggregation of data, and construction of the ISH index. The methodology allows the assessment of a composite ISH which captures the complexity of the national healthcare systems. The ISH is then applied to specific circumstances from different countries and is used in a crosscountry analysis to determine the progress towards a sustainable healthcare.

Back and Forth on Sustainable Development: A Focus on Healthcare Organisations

Sustainability

The sustainability of healthcare systems represents a relevant target of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda. Nevertheless, academic research has neglected to study healthcare systems when focusing on the transition toward sustainable healthcare. This study addresses this gap by investigating the implementation of the sustainable development (SD) principle in the Italian healthcare system, in light of international and national institutional discourses on SD. A questionnaire-based survey has been directed to the General Directors (GDs) of government-funded healthcare orgsanisations to investigate their perceptions about the SD principle applied to healthcare, their strategic planning for SD, their implemented projects for sustainability and the intellectual capital factors that influence the latter’s implementation. The study was conducted in two waves: a first survey was administered in 2016, with a second one in 2021. We used content analysis to identify the potential di...

Sustainable Development in Healthcare

International Journal of Reliable and Quality E-Healthcare, 2015

The implementation of the concept of sustainable development in the establishment of “Green Hospital” is attracting growing interest. The health sector and, in particular, a hospital may affect the environment and the economy in the a) maximization of energy consumption b) waste of natural resources c) difficulty in waste management due to their rapidly increasing volume d) construction of non-friendly for people and environment buildings e) growing demand for funds to cover operating expenses. Moreover, it seems that the strategic planning of a Green Hospital can cause significant changes to: a) Energy saving – Green development – Environment protection; b) Building reconstruction; c) Improvement of provided services to citizens; d) Saving of financial resources. Therefore, efforts should be made to save energy and money in the hospitals through sustainable development projects. Finally, the Green Hospital has the potential to provide improved therapeutic results for patients and m...

Sustainable healthcare: how to assess and improve healthcare structures' sustainability

Annali di igiene : medicina preventiva e di comunità

Sustainability is a broad and debated subject, often difficult to be defined and applied into real projects, especially when dealing with a complex scenario as the one of healthcare. Many research studies and evaluation systems have handled this topic from different perspectives, but many limits and criticalities still have to be overcome to properly cope with actual needs. The Sustainable Healthcare project has been developed through three main phases: a deep study of the state of the art, unraveling pros and cons of available sustainability scoring systems; an accurate analysis of the stakeholders network and their needs; the realization of an objective evaluation framework, through scientific methods, as the ANP. The newly developed evaluation system takes into consideration all the three pillars of sustainability, analyzing social, environmental and economic sustainability through a set of criteria, specified by measurable indicators. So the system identifies both global sustain...

Systemic Design for Sustainable Healthcare. Designing for the treatment of chronic diseases

2017

Health systems are facing significant societal and organizational challenges that require enhancing their resilience and sustainability. Public expenditure on health care and long-term care is expected to increase: health systems are searching for new solutions to controlling spending, implementing the use of available technology and engaging patients in prevention and self-care. The transition toward more sustainable health systems is both delicate and complex, and it needs radical changes of perspective as regards the patients' role and the holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to health care. Over the past years, interest in what is called "Sustainable Healthcare" has grown globally: there is no common definition, but all the approaches to this emerging domain focus on making health care environmentally, economically and socially viable. Although design could successfully address some crucial environmental issues of health care (from waste reduction to resource o...