The Health Service Environmental Sustainability (HSES) competition, hosted by the University of Melbourne, supports healthcare staff to design and deliver practical sustainability initiatives using a sustainable quality improvement framework. The program enables staff and teams to identify opportunities, implement change, and measure impact across both patient care and environmental outcomes.
At The Royal Children’s Hospital, we recognise the significant impact of healthcare delivery on environmental pollution and climate change, and that these have direct impact on the health and wellbeing of children. To commemorate World Environment Day on June 5th, the Campus Sustainability Committee has organised this Grand Round to highlight the increasing concern around plastics – their production, use and disposal – as a major hazard to human health.
The Australian healthcare system is a significant contributor to climate change through its own carbon footprint, which is estimated to be 7% of Australia’s total carbon emissions. National and international peak health organisations are urging healthcare sectors to decrease their emissions as quickly as possible, in order to uphold our core mission to sustain health and our responsibility to first do no harm.
In this talk, Professor Tony Capon will introduce the findings of the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health which published the report Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch in 2015, and canvass the implications of these findings for the future protection and promotion of human health and wellbeing.
The Victorian Government has a legislated target of net carbon zero by 2050 and is seeking to reduce Victoria’s greenhouse gas emissions by 15-20 per cent from 2005 levels by the year 2020. The Victorian public health system is responsible for a quarter of the government’s reported carbon emissions from stationary energy; over 800,000 tonnes in 2016-17. The environmental performance of the health system is measured through several metrics.
