Healthcare provision is a major contributor to the climate crisis, accounting for more than five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to researchers at Dalhousie University and Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) who have launched a new open-access, interactive database of healthcare’s environmental impacts.
The HealthcareLCA database attempts to serve as an up-to-date evidence repository, bringing together new and existing assessments into one publicly accessible location. It currently houses over 4,000 environmental impact values for more than 1,400 healthcare products and activities, including equipment, pharmaceuticals, investigations, procedures, services, and overall health systems. The platform is interactive in nature, allowing users to sort, search and filter data according to their individual needs and interests.
Lead researcher Dr Jonathan Drew, Adjunct Surgery at Dalhousie University, said: “Countries are increasingly making pledges to achieve sustainable, low carbon health systems. The success of these commitments will depend on having an accurate measure of healthcare’s environmental impacts and making sure that people working within healthcare can access and use that information.”
Senior author Dr Chantelle Rizan, Clinical Lecturer in Sustainable Healthcare at BSMS, added: “HealthcareLCA creates an opportunity for health professionals to learn more about the environmental impacts of healthcare, providing accessible and easy-to-understand evidence for administrators and decision-makers. It will also help researchers find existing studies, identify important research gaps, and create new possibilities for synthesising the available evidence.”
HealthcareLCA is a collaboration between CASCADES (Creating a Sustainable Canadian Health System in a Climate Crisis), BSMS, and the Creating Sustainable Health Systems in a Climate Crisis flagship project at Dalhousie University’s Healthy Populations Institute (co-led by Dr Daniel Rainham and Dr. Sean Christie).
CASCADES Director Fiona Miller, Professor of Health Policy at the University of Toronto, said: “CASCADES is delighted to support this important tool and the practice change that it will enable. There is so much interest in Life Cycle Analyses among the healthcare community and this vital resource will help those embarking on such projects to build on one another’s successes and co-create transformative change across healthcare systems.”
Today’s launch of the HealthcareLCA database coincides with the publication of Personal View article in The Lancet Planetary Health, which introduces the database and summarises this important research field.Read it here for further information.
Join HealthcareLCA’s creators on 18 January for an interactive introduction to this new tool.
Explore the database at www.healthcarelca.com
Read the accompanying Lancet Planetary Health Personal View article
