Design for Sustainable Healthcare in a European context

Abstract

In recent years, interest in Sustainable Healthcare has grown globally: many environmental issues are attracting great interest because they also represent a high cost for National Health Services. Resource consumption and waste production have huge environmental and economic impacts, deeply affecting the costs of medical treatments. Much research in recent years has focused on education and policy strategies to face these issues, but Design research could play a key role to integrate them, acting upstream the production process. This study aims to provide an overview on different European approaches to Sustainable Healthcare and Design for Healthcare, defining potentials and limitations to their development. The developed methodology combines two different levels of analysis, including macro (region) and micro (hospital and wards) environmental issues. The analysis has been applied to three different European case studies (from Italy, Sweden and Denmark). This allowed to highlight pros and cons of current international scenarios in regards of Sustainable Healthcare and Design strategies and their implementation