Sustainability for Health, an Evidence Base for Action - SHEBA
Making patients healthy – that’s the reason for the health service. Yet the NHS is at the same time contributing to a global catastrophe with carbon emissions of 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Climate change is the greatest health challenge of the 21st Century. The health sector should be leading the way in terms of organisational greening, but there is a lot to do! We need to create a sustainable health service that doesn’t compromise the health of future generations. We also need to ensure that the NHS has the vital tools to transform itself into a leader as a green organisation.
A key problem faced by all those within the NHS working on sustainability is that reliable, well organised information on what will make a difference is not available. The information may exist, but it is not easily accessible. Consequently, many decisions are made on the basis of serendipitous knowledge of isolated interventions.
There is also a huge amount of information outside the NHS that would be useful to people within the organisation. This data needs to be brought together in a useable format, and to complement existing sources of information. What’s needed is an evidence base that would allow both a sharing of experience and a systematic appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of different initiatives.
The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare (formerly known as the Campaign for Greener Healthcare) is developing SHEBA, "Sustainability for Health, an Evidence Base for Action", drawing on the expertise of the many organisations and individuals addressing sustainability both within and outside the NHS. SHEBA will be the best single source of evidence on the effectiveness of actions and practices designed to improve the sustainability of the NHS as measured by carbon use. SHEBA will also lead internationally on collecting the evidence for sustainability in healthcare.
In overseeing the development of SHEBA as a common resource, our intention is to provide information for decision making, and we expect SHEBA to include:
- Topic reviews – Broad reviews of topics, and systematic reviews of specific actions.
- Business cases – Structured, clear reviews of case studies and scientific reports.
- Descriptions of individual projects and initiatives.
- Scientific Articles – Field experiments and other scientific work.
- Product Reports – Reports contributed by industry.
- Methodology articles – Articles on how best to measure and evaluate initiatives.
- Questions and Answers – Forums for sharing experience and opinion.
- Legislation and legal requirements – The latest in UK and European legislation.
With the climate changing, healthcare organisations need to make important decisions about sustainability and health. These decisions must be based on reliable evidence informed by high quality information. SHEBA will provide this information.