How to decarbonise a care pathway
Once you’ve assessed a care pathway, look for its hotspots: the points where changes to care delivery will make the biggest difference. Below are practical ways to act on common hotspots without compromising patient safety or experience.
Actions are grouped by setting, so you can focus on the areas most relevant to your pathway.
General actions
- Manage waste appropriately, ensuring it is segregated and disposed of in the least carbon-intensive way possible
- Go paper-free where possible
- Turn off equipment and lighting when not in use
- Encourage active or communal travel (cycling, walking, public transport) for staff and, where relevant, patients
- Reduce use of unnecessary consumables (e.g. non-sterile gloves) and use reusable items where available and clinically appropriate
Prescribing and medicines
- Avoid over-prescribing, unnecessary polypharmacy and medicines wastage
- Undertake regular medication review, including review of discharge medication
- Practise antimicrobial stewardship
- Convert to oral medication promptly where appropriate
- Focus on medicines optimisation and consider greener alternatives where available, including greener inhaler prescribing
- Reduce use of carbon-intensive medicines such as Entonox
Community care
- Avoid unnecessary referrals, tests and imaging requests, and avoid over-diagnosis
- Reduce travel through telephone or video clinics where clinically appropriate
- Provide streamlined, efficient patient care to enable same-day outpatient clinics, diagnostic tests or pre-operative assessments, minimising the need for separate visits
- Focus on disease prevention and health promotion
Hospital care
- Avoid unnecessary referrals, tests and invasive procedures such as cannulation and venepuncture
- Avoid unnecessary additional clinical interventions, e.g. catheterisation, additional access lines and histology samples
- Perform operations as day-case procedures where clinically safe and appropriate
- Use local, regional or intravenous anaesthetic where possible; avoid desflurane or nitrous oxide where alternatives exist
- Reduce use of single-use consumables where clinically appropriate
- Rationalise instrument trays and the use of additional instruments
Next steps
Ready to put these ideas into practice? Find out how to assess your care pathway, explore more resources in our hub, or connect with peers in our Community of Practice.
