UBC’s Dr. Andrea MacNeill is part of a national team recently awarded $6 million from Environment and Climate Change Canada to create a network engaging Canada’s health care community in climate action and awareness.
Dr. Andrea MacNeill
The project, titled CASCADES (Creating a Sustainable Canadian Health System in a Climate Crisis), will be led by Dr. Fiona Miller, a professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME) at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and the founding director of the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems.
Project partners include Dr. MacNeill, a clinical associate professor in the faculty of medicine’s department of surgery who leads the Planetary Health Care Lab at UBC, Dr. Sean Christie and Gillian Ritcey of the Healthy Populations Institute at Dalhousie University, and Neil Ritchie and Linda Varangu of the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care. The team members are all connected to diverse regional and national health associations, health care leaders, clinicians, administrators and sustainability researchers.
The broad network-building these partner organizations will undertake is key to addressing health system sustainability by getting to “net-zero.” This means reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from healthcare as close to zero as possible, and offsetting the small subset of remaining emissions in socially and environmentally sustainable ways.
“This project is bottom-up change. We need a mandate from the health system—we need patients, communities, frontline providers, administrators and senior leaders to say that this is their business.”
Dr. Andrea MacNeill
Dr. MacNeill, also a cancer surgeon at Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and one of the founding partners in the network, says that “the bar has been set” by England’s National Health Service, which has committed to a net-zero health system for both direct and indirect emissions by 2045. For Canada to follow suit, all stakeholders in the health care system must be engaged, says Dr. MacNeill.
“This project is bottom-up change. We need a mandate from the health system—we need patients, communities, frontline providers, administrators and senior leaders to say that this is their business. That’s our job—to elevate that,” she says.
The project has two overarching goals. The first is to build the capacity of Canada’s health care community to achieve resilient, net-zero health care by increasing awareness and motivation, and by developing the skills, tools and networks to enable action. This will be achieved through professional development training to provide clinicians and administrators with the knowledge and skills to understand and support sustainable change, and via outreach and communications to foster awareness and attract new audiences.
The second goal is to cultivate and support sustainable health care innovations. This will be done by testing innovations using methods to assess whether they are improvements toward high-quality, low-greenhouse gas care. The most promising innovations will then be spread across Canada using “playbooks” to implement them so that they become best practice in sustainable health care. Examples of service delivery innovations include using alternative anesthetic gases and substituting standard asthma inhalers with dry powder inhalers or smaller volume inhalers.
A version of this article originally appeared on the University of Toronto website.
UBC is committed to taking bold steps to address the climate crisis. To learn more about the actions the university is taking visit climateemergency.ubc.ca.