Sustainable COPD Priorities 2012 survey
Tuesday, 17 April 2012 - 3:26pm
The Summit on 23 March came up with too many ideas - we need to decide where to start with improving sustainability of COPD care in 2012. Please help us by completing this survey, which scores each area for clinical/environmental impact, programme development impact, and achievability. The results will inform the first meeting of the Sustainable COPD Advisory Group. Closing date 29 April 2012.
Centre for Sustainable Healthcare
04/2012
Comments
Priority Setting
There is a danger when looking at a subject as big as climate change to get that overwhelming feeling of helplessness like trying to take a bite out of a huge beach-ball - it's just impossible to get a grip.
The key to making such a big area of concern manageable is to split the task down into more digestible chunks.
The list of priorities in the attached helps to break some of these areas down into more approachable problem areas.
My own feeling is that we need to take a multi-pronged approach:
With disease and treatment-specific areas - reinforcing the need for a greater attention to prevention, and high-impact, low-carbon interventions like pulmonary rehab and smoking cessation are key.
To allow patients to start to make choices which help to reduce the carbon footprint of their own care - engage with efforts to increase recycling of inhaler devices - this may well help to change conversations in the waiting rooms, and spark new ideas from those who really use the services we offer.
And finally - high-level policy - for this, I think that the footprinting of models of care is important, and advocacy at the highest levels on issues like air quality and a more sustainable transport infrastructure is vital.
Please take a look at the linked document, and send it back to Frances so that the network can start to work on the areas where we can make real progress, and start to show how improvements can be made.