Implementing a hospital sustainability quality improvement project: challenges and best practices for trainees

Climate change affects human health, but substantial greenhouse gas emissions from the global healthcare sector also contribute to climate change, creating a damaging feedback loop.1 The healthcare field is increasingly prioritising climate change as a critical focus area, particularly within medical training programmes.23456789 This has spawned burgeoning efforts at both systems and individual levels towards decarbonising healthcare, with the global green hospitals market projected by some to grow in value by $60bn (£48bn; €55bn) from 2022 to 2030.1011 At the individual level, medical trainees often seek to positively impact their healthcare systems through quality improvement projects.12 Therefore, the increase in climate health consciousness has been paralleled by trainee led sustainability projects, such as life cycle assessments of single use medical devices or personal protective equipment and hospital waste reduction projects.131415

Although multiple frameworks, such as Lean and Six Sigma, exist for guiding quality improvement projects in general, trainees attempting to enact environmental sustainability projects within their healthcare systems will face context specific challenges. Here, we give a primer for trainees containing tips that we learnt as medical students implementing a waste reduction quality improvement project within our healthcare system.