Standing firm for more sustainable care: 'We need the combined strength of the sector'

When you think of sectors that need to be made more sustainable, the first thing that comes to mind may not be healthcare. Yet the medical sector in the Netherlands is responsible for 7 percent of national CO2 emissions. Various initiators are therefore taking up the gauntlet to make healthcare more sustainable and circular. Some of the boosters that Change Inc. already spoke to this year.

Patrick Deckers is president of Caring Doctors, a collective of 2,300 healthcare professionals who want to make a fist against the deterioration of our planet and life on it. Deckers previously worked as an orthopedic surgeon, but quit his job to focus entirely on Caring Doctors. To Change Inc. he told about an initiative to make the diet in hospitals more plant-based.

"A hospital with solar panels and heat pumps everyone thinks is great. But if you say: we are also going to make the food sustainable, it suddenly becomes very exciting. Then emotions come into play. Then it becomes about patronizing and people quickly find the message pedantic. The kitchens in healthcare facilities are huge. It's not just food for patients, but also staff kitchens and food for visitors. Many millions of meals are served in healthcare facilities every year. If you make a transition there to more plant-based, you send an important signal to the rest of society. We really need to start eating healthier."

According to Deckers, a healthy diet is the cornerstone of a healthy society. In fact, lifestyle plays an important role in rising healthcare costs. An unhealthy diet with lots of animal products causes obesity and, for example, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer. A plant-based diet, on the other hand, gives a smaller chance of health problems. Caring Doctors therefore engages with healthcare facilities to make their menu more sustainable and offers education in the form of cooking workshops. "When cooks, doctors and nurses get to work with plant-based foods together, they are often surprised to see that you can very easily provide the same quality of nutrition."

Read the entire interview with Patrick Deckers here.

A collective of thousands of healthcare professionals is the Green Care Alliance. Consisting of over two hundred committees and green teams, the organization tries in various ways to make healthcare facilities more sustainable. GP and researcher Evelyn Brakema chairs the Green Care Alliance and aims to raise awareness among the Dutch about the relationship between climate change and health.

"Climate change is already so close at hand. I once had a 70-year-old woman stop by during my GP visit who had spent three days in her garage because it was too hot in her house in the summer. We need to make it clear that climate policy helps reduce these kinds of negative health risks. As health care providers, we have a preeminent role to tell that story. And that will be even more important during the upcoming cabinet term than before."

But behavior within healthcare facilities could also be looked at more closely, according to Brakema. She points out that when it comes to medical interventions, a trade-off is currently made primarily between their affordability, quality and accessibility. "I think sustainability is also very important to add to that. There are many examples of making operations more sustainable without making the quality of care worse. But sometimes you will have to ask painful questions. Are we going to operate on someone who does not have a good life expectancy just to stretch that life by three months? Or, in the case of environmentally damaging medications, might treatment for one person lead to the lives of several elsewhere becoming worse? These are sensitive questions that we have long avoided, but are good to ask."

Read the entire interview with Evelyn Brakema here.

A true coryfee in sustainable care is Cathy van Beek. Van Beek is a former director of the Radboudumc, healthcare ambassador for CSR Netherlands and, above all, one of the first to put sustainable healthcare on the map - more than twenty years ago. Since then, she has seen many initiatives emerge, but misses the united forces of the entire sector. "Johnson & Johnson (one of the big suppliers in the medical industry, ed.) is really not going to listen to the sustainable demands of one hospital," she said in an earlier interview with Change Inc. "To change the system, we need the combined strength of the sector."

Van Beek emphasizes that much remains to be done if the healthcare sector is to meet its sustainability goals. For example, the goal of reducing resource consumption by 50 percent by 2030. "Of the five pillars of the Green Deal, I am the most pessimistic about this. It requires us to look over our own shadow. Actually, the scale of the Netherlands is too small to achieve this. For this we need to play an active role in Europe, through European scientific associations." According to van Beek, healthcare professionals at the European level hold the key to putting pressure on manufacturers to make their processes and materials more sustainable.

Read the entire interview with Cathy van Beek here.