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Green Team Networking Hub
As part of the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care's Preparing Canada’s Health Care Buildings for Net-Zero project, funded by the Government of Canada's Low Carbon Economy Implementation Readiness Fund, we’ve created the Green Team Networking Hub designed to empower health care sustainability champions to connect, collaborate, and lead transformative change across Canada’s health care sector.
Join our bi-monthly online meetings to share/learn about new resources, engage with peers, and showcase your team’s initiatives. By bridging knowledge gaps, learning from innovative practices, and building collective expertise, the hub will enable participants and assist them in implementing impactful sustainability actions and drive progress toward a resilient, net-zero future.
The first meeting will be held January 2025. By signing up using the form below you will receive hub updates and an automatic invite to the meetings.
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Award - 2024 Health Care Climate Champion!
The Coalition is honoured to share that Health Care Without Harm has recognized our organization with a Climate Leadership Award - Gold! They have also chosen us as the 2024 Health Care Climate Champion from the US and Canada.
This award celebrates our commitment to the Health Care Climate Challenge, where we pledge to actively reduce health care’s carbon footprint, prepare for the increasing impacts of extreme weather and the shifting burden of disease, and educate both our staff and the public on the vital intersection between health and climate change.
This recognition is a testament to the dedication of our entire team, whose passion and hard work keep driving us toward a more sustainable future.
We look forward to building on this momentum in 2025 and beyond, joining with the global health community to lead the way toward a low-carbon, more resilient and healthier future for all.
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Welcome to our Advisors' Corner, where we explore what inspires our advisors to champion sustainability in health care. They share their insights on the most impactful changes the sector can make, as well as the barriers and opportunities on the path to a greener future.
Our next feature is Dr. Diane de Camps Meschino. Dr. Meschino is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, specializing in health leadership and system transformation. She founded the Reproductive Life Stages Program at Women’s College Hospital and is a founding member of Sanokondu, a global community of practice dedicated to advancing health care leadership education. Dr. Meschino also serves as a Complex Care Psychiatrist at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. Passionate about global health, she champions leadership education to improve health care delivery and drive the evolution of health systems.
Click the link below to learn about Dr. Meschino’s upbringing and her perspective on the intersection of health leadership and climate resilience. She shares her vision for creating sustainable health care practices and adapting health systems to address climate change.
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Recognizing Leadership in Pharmacy Sustainability
CASCADES
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Medications are integral to the provision of health care. At the same time, they have significant environmental impacts, and their reliable and safe use is threatened by climate change.
Pharmacy professionals and prescribers are making important contributions to efforts to reduce the climate and environmental harms of medications and adapt to the stresses and shocks of climate.
To celebrate and share this expertise, CASCADES is collecting stories from people across Canada working to promoting climate resilient, low carbon and sustainable pharmacy and prescribing practices. This includes:
- How climate change or climate emergencies are shaping practice
- How pharmacists and prescribers are adapting to the stresses and shocks of climate
- Actions big and small that have been taken to reduce the environmental impact of medications or pharmacy practices
These stories will be showcased on the CASCADES website and social media during Pharmacy Appreciation Month next spring.
Submission deadline: January 31, 2025
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Accounting for health: The business case for green space
Living Architecture Monitor
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The evidence is clear. Healthy natural environments are essential for human health. From regulating air and water pollution and to moderating surface temperatures, to providing opportunities for physical activity, recreation and relaxation, greenspaces provide a multitude of physical and mental health benefits.
Many of us can relate to stories of the exhilaration felt, the physical energy exerted, or the respite from the heat achieved from time spent in nature – whether hiking through the forest or taking a relaxing stroll along a tree-lined section of an urban park. But can those feelings and experiences of “improved health and wellness” be quantified?
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Planetary health in nursing: A scoping review
Wiley
As one of the largest health professions, nurses can be integral in advancing human and planetary health. Nurses are pivotal in confronting these issues due to their unique position and focus on addressing social justice issues leading to health inequities.
Although adopting a planetary health perspective is crucial for nurses to grasp and mitigate the links between ecological disruptions and human health, little is known of how planetary health is incorporated into recent nursing literature.
Thus, a scoping review was conducted to determine how the term ‘planetary health’ is incorporated into nursing and what has been published about planetary health in nursing literature.
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Green health: How to decarbonise global health care systems
Sustainable Earth News
Health care systems are major greenhouse gas emitters, contributing to climate change and harming global health. This study reviewed 230 publications to identify decarbonization strategies targeting health care’s scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Key themes include transportation, anaesthesia, energy, supply chains, clinical practices, planetary health literacy, and systemic changes. While the potential for decarbonization is vast, uncertainties remain, requiring ambitious global and local actions.
Knowledge sharing between countries and coordinated efforts through localized audits and large-scale policies are essential to reduce emissions and promote sustainable health care systems worldwide.
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New guidance launched for safe, climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health care facilities
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a new report: Safe, climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health care facilities: an overview.
This publication provides policymakers, health administrators, facility managers and health practitioners with guidance on what is needed to develop safe, climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health care facilities to provide quality care and withstand the environmental crises.
As the global environmental crises – including climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss – worsen, health systems and facilities must urgently respond to avoid being overwhelmed by the growing challenges and disruptions.
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Anesthetic Gases: Environmental Impacts and Mitigation Strategies for Fluranes and Nitrous Oxide
MDPI
Anesthetic gases, including fluorocarbons ("fluranes") and nitrous oxide (N₂O), contribute to health care's environmental impact due to their high global warming and ozone-depleting potentials. Fluranes, also classified as PFAS, and N₂O emissions are growing concerns. Efforts to substitute high-impact fluranes with alternatives have shown partial success, while emission control strategies, such as adsorption and catalytic decomposition, are under development. However, mixed emissions pose challenges, and up to 50% of fluranes may escape into operating rooms as fugitive emissions. Improved quantification, containment strategies, and cost–benefit analyses are critical for reducing emissions and advancing sustainable anesthetic practices.
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Survey: Climate-Health Literacy and Occupational Therapy | |
The University of British Columbia’s Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy department is currently recruiting participants for an important 10-15 minute survey regarding the perceptions of climate-health literacy among Canadian occupational therapists.
This survey will help inform how best to support occupational therapists in being leaders within the health care field in responding to the ongoing climate crisis.
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Meeting the EAT-Lancet ‘healthy’ diet target while protecting land and water resources
Nature Sustainability
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The EAT-Lancet diet promotes healthier eating and reduced environmental impacts, yet its global feasibility remains uncertain. This study combines agro-hydrological modeling with optimization analysis to minimize irrigation use while achieving EAT-Lancet goals globally. Six dietary scenarios, reflecting cultural dietary habits, livestock systems, and trade patterns, were assessed. Results indicate that optimized cropland allocation and adjusted trade flows could sustainably support the EAT-Lancet diet.
This approach could reduce global cultivated land by 37–40%, irrigation-water use by 78%, and unsustainably irrigated areas by 22%. However, adopting this diet would increase global food trade's share of production from 25% to 36%.
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New Alberta hospital agency to be up and running in the spring, minister says
Toronto Star
Alberta’s health minister says the province’s new hospital agency will be operational next spring, months later than expected.
Adriana LaGrange announced Monday that hospitals now run by Alberta Health Services and Covenant Health would answer to the new agency, Acute Care Alberta, once it’s running.
She said the new agency would solely be an oversight body, and Alberta Health Services and Covenant Health would keep their executive teams and boards as well as staff.
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What a hospital stay will cost you in 196 countries around the world
HelloSafe
If you are reading these lines, you may be preparing for a trip. But before you leave, it's a good idea to double-check your health cover.
To convince you of this, HelloSafe has compiled a list of hospital costs in 196 countries around the world. And you'll see that the bill can be very high in some countries!
The data on this map comes from the World Health Organisation and Health Action International databases. All amounts are expressed in Canadian dollars.
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Halifax Lab receives Green Labs Gold Certification | |
The Halifax Cytopathology lab participated in Green Labs Certification through the Dalhousie Office of Sustainability Green Labs Initiative. The lab completed an initial sustainability survey scoring 32% and received detailed feedback with a recommendation to select 6 areas for improvement.
They identified several sustainability practices already in place, including solvent recycling, and made small and larger improvements, the most impactful being replacing fluorescent light tubes with LED, reducing the lab incubator’s energy consumption by 70% though a timer, and implementing Halifax municipal and Nova Scotia Health recycling and waste guidelines, diverting several items from waste to recycling, and reducing special medical waste by 75%. On the final survey the lab scored 62% obtaining gold certification.
The lost points were mainly due to the inability to control aspects of purchasing, illustrating the need to demand sustainable health care products from industry at the organisational level.
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Version 9.1 of the RETScreen® Clean Energy Management Software platform is now available for download from the RETScreen website. This update has arrived with a number of salient new features to enhance the RETScreen experience!
One of the latest features is an automated Net Zero Planning Tool which further enables portfolio-wide decarbonization planning, implementation, monitoring and reporting – all available within one single multilingual platform. Learn more about the new tool HERE.
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BC Virtual Health Grand Rounds: Reimagining Virtual Care through Patient Partnership
UBC
Date: December 11th, 2024
Time: 11:00am-12:00pm ET
Join a quarterly provincial rounds series for health professionals, health administrators and IT colleagues to explore transformative, technology-enabled health care delivery. Discuss the risks, benefits and considerations for adopting technology to support patient-centered care.
The second session of this series will feature Dr. Adrian Yee who will speak on the topic of Reimagining Virtual Care through Patient Partnership.
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Community Led Resources for Textile Reuse
The National Association for Charitable Textile Recycling
Date: December 10th, 2024
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm ET
Join this webinar where speakers will introduce the newly released Community-Led Resources for Textile Reuse by NACTR. This essential toolkit is designed to empower communities, municipalities, and organisations to implement and sustain textile recycling initiatives at the local level. Whether you're a community leader, sustainability advocate, or involved in waste management, this webinar is packed with practical tools and strategies to make an immediate impact in your community.
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Have you registered as an organ donor?
Contact your local organ donation agency and speak to your family about your wishes. You have the power to save and transform lives. Learn more and register to donate HERE.
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The Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care is Canada’s premier green health care resource network, leading the evolution of green in Canada’s health sector as a national voice and catalyst for environmental change. www.greenhealthcare.ca | |
Some articles referred to in the Digest make reference to services and/or product offerings from specific suppliers. The CCGHC recommends that readers research the service and product offerings available through a wider range of suppliers for comparison purposes and in keeping with public sector purchasing guidelines. These articles should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any product or service. | | | | |
