Sustainable Healthcare Workshop

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This research development workshop will be held April 6-8, 2018 in New Haven, CT, focused on improving sustainability engineering methods and tools for use in healthcare delivery. This workshop will bring together experts from environmental and industrial engineering, materials science, clinical care, public health and policy, health care administration, and health economics, to identify knowledge gaps and develop a strategic action plan to fill these gaps in addressing one of the grand challenges of healthcare environmental sustainability: balancing patient safety with waste reduction and pollution prevention. An aim is to discover synergies that arise from combining different approaches and various perspectives to address this challenge. The workshop will describe the scope of evidence-based information, identify gaps, and development research priorities in order to produce information/tools to support clinicians/healthcare administrators in efforts to reduce health care pollution and waste. The workshop intends to develop a strategic action plan for sustainability in healthcare which identifies critical research needs and the obstacles and opportunities in safely addressing the resource consumption of medical and clinical care. The impetus for this workshop lies in the excessive waste and resource use of current US healthcare services. Through the systems lens provided by sustainability engineering, researchers have begun to quantify material use and environmental emissions from medicine, yet the broadening of these quantification studies and their translation into clinical practice have been slow in developing. This workshop will (1) bring together interdisciplinary researchers to help reinforce ongoing and forge new research connections to tackle healthcare sustainability in an actionable way, and (2) develop strategies to develop, test, and implement clinically-relevant sustainability interventions, so that the actual footprint and resource-use of medicine will be minimized.