An ethical investigation into environmental sustainability in healthcare.

Healthcare as an industry is one of the most environmentally destructive on earth in almost every respect (e.g. energy use, harmful gas emissions, and physical waste).

The enormous environmental toll of delivering healthcare is fundamentally at odds with healthcare's goal of improving health and wellbeing.

Indeed, it is the drive to achieve healthcare excellence with world class medical safety and effective treatments that is ultimately so resource intensive and polluting.

This project aims to address the dilemma of how to ethically make medical decisions that adequately account for patients and the environment.

In particular, I am interested in how we can ethically make trade offs between what is owed to individuals, collective groups, and future generations.

For example, what might be best for the treatment of an individual may harm the environment and be detrimental to collective society or future generations. What is the best course of action?

I use these three groups as lenses to examine three case studies of areas of environmental concern in medicine: the environmental cost of medical treatments; medical waste production; and the environmental benefits of remote treatment. My findings aim to inform this cutting edge area of applied ethics, healthcare policy and practice.