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Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND: The world faces a significant global health threat – climate change, which makes creating more environmentally sustainable healthcare systems necessary. As a resource-intensive specialty, anesthesiology contributes to a substantial fraction of healthcare’s environmental impact. This alar...

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Autores principales: Gasciauskaite, Greta, Lunkiewicz, Justyna, Spahn, Donat R., Von Deschwanden, Corinna, Nöthiger, Christoph B., Tscholl, David W.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10655271/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37978425
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12871-023-02344-1
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author Gasciauskaite, Greta
Lunkiewicz, Justyna
Spahn, Donat R.
Von Deschwanden, Corinna
Nöthiger, Christoph B.
Tscholl, David W.
author_facet Gasciauskaite, Greta
Lunkiewicz, Justyna
Spahn, Donat R.
Von Deschwanden, Corinna
Nöthiger, Christoph B.
Tscholl, David W.
author_sort Gasciauskaite, Greta
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The world faces a significant global health threat – climate change, which makes creating more environmentally sustainable healthcare systems necessary. As a resource-intensive specialty, anesthesiology contributes to a substantial fraction of healthcare’s environmental impact. This alarming situation invites us to reconsider the ecological health determinants and calls us to action. METHODS: We conducted a single-center qualitative study involving an online survey to explore the environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspectives in a center implementing internal environmentally-sustainable anesthesia guidelines. We asked care providers how they perceive the importance of environmental issues in their work; the adverse effects they see on ecological sustainability in anesthesia practice; what measures they take to make anesthesia more environmentally friendly; what barriers they face in trying to do so; and why they are unable to adopt ecologically friendly practices in some instances. Using a thematic analysis approach, we identified dominating themes in participants’ responses. RESULTS: A total of 62 anesthesia providers completed the online survey. 89% of the participants stated that environmental sustainability is essential in their work, and 95% reported that they implement measures to make their practice greener. A conscious choice of anesthetics was identified as the most common step the respondents take to reduce the environmental impact of anesthesia. Waste production and improper waste management was the most frequently mentioned anesthesia-associated threat to the environment. Lacking knowledge/teaching in sustainability themes was recognized as a crucial barrier to achieving ecology goals. CONCLUSIONS: Sustainable anesthesia initiatives have the potential to both encourage engagement among anesthesia providers and raise awareness of this global issue. These findings inspire opportunities for action in sustainable anesthesia and broaden the capacity to decrease the climate impact of health care. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12871-023-02344-1.
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spelling pubmed-106552712023-11-17 Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study Gasciauskaite, Greta Lunkiewicz, Justyna Spahn, Donat R. Von Deschwanden, Corinna Nöthiger, Christoph B. Tscholl, David W. BMC Anesthesiol Research BACKGROUND: The world faces a significant global health threat – climate change, which makes creating more environmentally sustainable healthcare systems necessary. As a resource-intensive specialty, anesthesiology contributes to a substantial fraction of healthcare’s environmental impact. This alarming situation invites us to reconsider the ecological health determinants and calls us to action. METHODS: We conducted a single-center qualitative study involving an online survey to explore the environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspectives in a center implementing internal environmentally-sustainable anesthesia guidelines. We asked care providers how they perceive the importance of environmental issues in their work; the adverse effects they see on ecological sustainability in anesthesia practice; what measures they take to make anesthesia more environmentally friendly; what barriers they face in trying to do so; and why they are unable to adopt ecologically friendly practices in some instances. Using a thematic analysis approach, we identified dominating themes in participants’ responses. RESULTS: A total of 62 anesthesia providers completed the online survey. 89% of the participants stated that environmental sustainability is essential in their work, and 95% reported that they implement measures to make their practice greener. A conscious choice of anesthetics was identified as the most common step the respondents take to reduce the environmental impact of anesthesia. Waste production and improper waste management was the most frequently mentioned anesthesia-associated threat to the environment. Lacking knowledge/teaching in sustainability themes was recognized as a crucial barrier to achieving ecology goals. CONCLUSIONS: Sustainable anesthesia initiatives have the potential to both encourage engagement among anesthesia providers and raise awareness of this global issue. These findings inspire opportunities for action in sustainable anesthesia and broaden the capacity to decrease the climate impact of health care. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12871-023-02344-1. BioMed Central 2023-11-17 /pmc/articles/PMC10655271/ /pubmed/37978425 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12871-023-02344-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Gasciauskaite, Greta
Lunkiewicz, Justyna
Spahn, Donat R.
Von Deschwanden, Corinna
Nöthiger, Christoph B.
Tscholl, David W.
Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study
title Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study
title_full Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study
title_fullStr Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study
title_full_unstemmed Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study
title_short Environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study
title_sort environmental sustainability from anesthesia providers’ perspective: a qualitative study
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10655271/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37978425
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12871-023-02344-1
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