Description
Introduction: During the World Hospital Congress in 2022, the Geneva Sustainability Centre (GSC), launched by the International Hospital Federation in 2022, conducted a short survey among leaders of healthcare organizations worldwide. This exercise revealed that, despite the increasing recognition of the climate crisis as a health crisis, sustainability is not thoroughly understood by the leadership within healthcare organizations, nor has been fully integrated into the agenda of hospitals.
This emphasized the need to provide healthcare leaders a mechanism to assess their organizations’ maturity level in terms of sustainability, obtain guidance to advance in their journey and, ultimately, be able to strategically design and implement initiatives to drive the transition towards sustainable, resilient, and low-carbon healthcare. Based on this, at the World Hospital Congress in 2023, the GSC launched the Sustainability Accelerator Tool (SAT).
This session will present the preliminary results of the use of the SAT, providing an overview of the aggregated data and identifying opportunity areas.
Methodology: In 2022, 125 healthcare leaders completed a sample questionnaire based on the assessment framework developed for the SAT. Besides confirming the need to provide a tool for healthcare leaders to help advance their sustainability journey, the results of the survey shed light on the requirements of the tool to provide recommendations and guidance to improve sustainability, as well as indicators to facilitate monitoring and reporting of their progress.
In 2023, the SAT was piloted by 18 hospitals from different regions around the world, and we expect SAT to be widely adopted by hospitals and healthcare systems worldwide.
The session will present a synopsis and analysis of the aggregated data of the hospitals and healthcare systems using the SAT.
Results: To this date, there are no other mechanisms allowing the evaluation and monitoring of sustainability initiatives in the healthcare sector globally. In addition to serving as a useful tool for healthcare leaders to strategize, identify opportunities and define priorities, and ultimately transition to sustainable, resilient, and low-carbon healthcare, the SAT has the potential to widely contribute to global health by providing a clear overview and evidence of the main strengths and opportunity areas in the sector. This can also support advancing research by identifying gaps and trends, as well as focalizing initiatives, efforts, and funding.
Conclusions: The SAT offers healthcare leaders a systematically consistent mechanism to evaluate, monitor and improve their actions and initiatives in terms of sustainable, resilient, and low-carbon healthcare. Through this, it enables healthcare organizations to increase the quality of the services they offer while complying with international accreditation standards and, in consequence, improve health outcomes of the populations they serve.
In addition, the widespread use of SAT in the future offers a broad range of possibilities for future research, focalized implementation of actions and programmes, and funding, which ultimately will contribute to advance climate and health goals at the global level.
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