Sustainability in healthcare

This branch covers healthcare's environmental and social sustainability, divided by the aspect a writer needs to understand: concepts and measurement, impacts and trade-offs, goals and policy, and communication. Sustainability in a writer's own working practice, detailed trial protocol design, and the wider relationships between human, animal, and environmental health belong to their own branches.

• What sustainability means, and the limits it is measured against — the definitions, the Anthropocene, the planetary boundaries, development against footprint, and doughnut economics against GDP
• How a footprint is defined and measured — carbon neutral against net zero and real zero, the three scopes, checkable targets, life-cycle assessment, embodied energy, and a person's own footprint
• Counting the handprint as well as the footprint — where footprint thinking stops, what handprint thinking counts, and where medical writers come in
• The healthcare industry's own footprint — the waste healthcare generates, the sector's share of global emissions, emissions against revenue, and where the emissions sit inside a health system
• The carbon footprint of clinical trials — what the published audits of individual trials measured, which activities drive the emissions, and how far the figures generalise
• Pharmaceuticals in the environment — how drug residues reach ecosystems and return to people, manufacturing waste, packaging waste, biodiversity, where pharmaceutical waste comes from, and ecopharmacovigilance
• Weighing reuse against single use in healthcare — trading one impact against another, designing devices for reuse, and decontaminating the pandemic's masks
• The Sustainable Development Goals — the goals, their relevance to medical writing and organisations, quality education, and assessments of progress
• What pharmaceutical companies and EU policy commit healthcare to — how the largest companies compare, why scope 3 is the hard part, what drives a company's targets, and the European Green Deal's healthcare strands
• Reading sustainability where the health system is the constraint — the African context, where power, water, money and literacy bind before carbon does
• Veterinary sustainability — where livestock, aquaculture and pets sit in the environmental account, how a veterinary practice reduces its own footprint, and how the profession is spreading the message
• Reading and writing corporate sustainability claims — the frameworks and ratings a report answers to, what a company report measures, greenwashing, and where an offset stops being one
• Documents that sustainability generates — the regulatory and grant documents that now carry environmental content, the variation process for a packaging or propellant change, and the Declaration of Helsinki's wording
• Writing about sustainability so readers can use it — what "green" names, the transparency habits clinical research can lend, terms and numbers in plain language, what to write about for whom, and framing an environmental threat so readers can act