Sustainable Healthcare

Transforming healthcare to minimise its carbon and environmental footprints and enable the future provision of high-quality, cost-effective healthcare that doesn’t contribute to adverse health impacts.

About

Healthcare is a significant contributor to climate change and environmental pollution. Urgent solutions are needed to address healthcare’s carbon footprint (7% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions) and significant consumption of resources - including energy, equipment, therapeutics, food and non-clinical products. We are working to transform clinical care through prevention, improved evidence-based efficiencies, sustainable models of care and circular economies by co-designing and implementing real world solutions with healthcare policy makers, reserachers, practitioners, organisations and industry.

Leads

Eugenie Kayak – Enterprise Professor in Sustainable Healthcare, Department of Critical Care, Melbourne Medical School, MDHS

• Professor Kayak is a consultant anaesthetist at Austin and Alfred Health and Enterprise Professor in Sustainable Healthcare at the University of Melbourne. For over a decade she has been a leader and champion for healthcare sustainability, working with Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA), her own specialty, the AMA and wider medical profession to raise awareness of, and address, healthcare’s carbon footprint and environmental impact.

Forbes McGain – Associate Dean, Healthcare Sustainability, MDHS

• Forbes is an anaesthetist and intensive care physician at Western Health, Melbourne, Australia, and an Associate Professor (Medicine) in the Department of Critical Care Medicine, University of Melbourne and the School of Public Health, University of Sydney. He has contributed to ground-breaking research to measure the environmental footprint of several clinical interventions and detailed lifecycle assessments to definitively compare and contrast the environmental impacts of different treatments.

Jess Davies – Anaesthetist and Honorary Lecturer, Department of Critical Care, Melbourne Medical School, MDHS

• Dr Jess Davies is an anaesthetist at Austin Health, Honorary Lecturer in the Department of Critical Care and co-founder of the TRA2SH Research Network, empowering others to make real-world changes to reduce the carbon footprint of healthcare. Jess is undertaking a PhD to explore how we can implement environmental sustainability into operating theatres, which are one of the highest carbon areas in hospitals.