Putting sustainable healthcare into practice

Emma Wright (EW): Sustainable healthcare is the premise for resilience in healthcare systems today and tomorrow. It represents a future where people can enjoy optimal health and wellbeing, delivered by efficient and reliable systems with minimal environmental impact, and where patients and healthcare professionals can feel truly fulfilled.

For healthcare to be truly sustainable, we must consider the human as well as the economic and environmental factors that lay the foundation for what sustainability is. At the moment, burnout, administrative burden and systemic inefficiencies are driving many to leave the profession and are also deterring prospective students from doing healthcare degrees. Without bringing these challenges into the broader sustainability conversation, we risk missing a significant piece of the puzzle.

We often speak about value-based healthcare where success is measured by outcomes rather than the volume of activity. Unfortunately, this approach remains out of reach in many areas, for example in wound care, where reimbursement models often reward the number of visits rather than healing outcomes. The shift towards value-based wound care is especially urgent if we are to truly improve care quality and efficiency. Many often think about value in terms of the services performed rather than the outcomes they achieve — and to me, that is the wrong way around. Value-based healthcare requires a long-term approach and a funding strategy that works across care settings to follow the patient journey.