Whilst it often attracts less attention than other threats, the intersection of healthcare and the environment is becoming increasingly apparent. The health and care sector are facing a monumental challenge: addressing its significant impact on the climate whilst delivering high-quality care under often immense pressures. The sector's environmental impact is profound, if taken as a country, global healthcare would rank as the fifth largest global greenhouse gas emitter. This immense climate footprint arises from almost all aspects of delivery, including energy consumption, transportation, and medical product lifecycle emissions. For instance, the UK's NHS alone contributes approximately 4% of the country's total emissions, and NHS England has estimated that the manufacture, supply, and use of pharmaceuticals account for 25% of the NHS' total carbon footprint. As we grapple with the pressing realities of climate change, alongside budget and capacity constraints of health systems, innovative and sustainable solutions are paramount ' the urgency of which cannot be overstated. If we, as a global community, want to see immediate health benefits, tackling emissions from the very system that seeks to help us when we are sick must be at the top of the list....
In my long tenure as CIO at a large academic health system, I was often accosted by senior members of the medical, nursing, or administrative staff, just back from a meeting: âI saw a demo of this next-generation electronic-health-records system. Unbelievable! It saves lives, reduces costs, improves the patient experience, and mows lawns! We need to implement it here! It would transform us!â...
For regions shut down due to Covid-19 to safely begin to reopen, we need ways to keep R â the average number of additional people infected by each infected person â under one, the threshold below which epidemics contract and ultimately die out. Among the proposals for how we can do this in the United States, one calls for frequent population-wide testing to identify and isolate those who are infected. Others suggest that the country will be hard-pressed to get through this without either prolonging lockdowns or intermittently reinstating them whenever infections rise until we have enough testing and contact tracing to control the spread or enough people become immune through infection or vaccination. The former requires testing on a scale that, barring a breakthrough, will not be possible anytime soon. The latter would inflict ongoing social and economic damage with the specter of lockdowns constantly looming over us....
Vaccine experts around the world are justifiably concerned by the lack of scientific data on the âSputnik Vâ vaccine for Covid-19 that Russia recently approved after less than two months of human testing on a non-randomized group of 39 patients. But they are also worried about the potentially chilling effect its possible failure could have on public acceptance of whichever of the dozens of other Covid-19 vaccines in the pipeline eventually proves safe and effective. Business leaders should be concerned as well and must begin to play a central role now in building public confidence in vaccines....
