Sustainability in primary healthcare practice, no time to lose!

Paul Van Royen, Lieve Peremans, Radost Asenova

Keywords: sustainability, primary care, general practice, environmental health, climate change, survey, qualitative research

Background:

Worldwide climate change leads to extreme heat, lack of water and natural resources, but has also negative effects on people’s health with more respiratory and cardiovascular diseases due to pollution and unhealthy lifestyle. Healthcare is responsible for 7% of worldwide CO2 emission and general practice has a significant share in it. Pollutes are medicine use, energy and transport. One health, planetary health and sustainability are formulated as creating the bedrock and allowing an integrated approach for the revised WONCA European definition of general practice.
Participants at an EGPRN Network workshop during Brussels WONCA conference, discussed collaborative studies and made an exercise on developing a project about sustainable primary care. Sustainability seems to be a broad concept and all participants had different views on which aspects are important in their country. Different topics were listed: energy-saving measures, climate-friendly devices for asthma, less disposable material, home visits by bike, paperless practice, review of procedures for disinfection. The idea grew to develop an European collaborative study on this topic.

Research questions:

This study intends to gain insight on GPs’ knowledge, perspectives about sustainability in primary health care and on how they implement sustainability actions in their own practice.

Method:

A literature-based survey will be developed and distributed among GPs in different European countries. EGPRN national representatives/members will be invited to distribute the survey in their own country.
Based on the analysis of these survey data, we will organize a nominal group to frame a priority list for further research. To get more insight into these priorities, relevant experiences and feasible implementation strategies, in-depth interviews will be organized among relevant GP stakeholders in several European countries

Results:

This study will provide GPs’ perspectives on sustainable primary care practice and on how this varies across and within countries. We also will define gaps and objectives for further research.

Conclusions:

Points for discussion:

What is your experience on sustainability in primary care?

How to select and include respondents for the survey and relevant stakeholders for the interviews?

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