The sustainable healthcare movement is growing and thriving. After picking the low-hanging fruit, it’s time to go after the higher-hanging fruit. According to Nicole Hunfeld and Wouter Hehenkamp, we’re not there yet. To get there, we need to move away from the idea that “anything goes in healthcare.” System players, such as the pharmaceutical industry, will also need to adapt and move along.

The story of how the seed of sustainable healthcare was planted differs between the two dialogue partners. Hunfeld: “For me, it happened during the COVID period. I was shocked by the overflowing bins of waste in the ICUs and the enormous dependence on disposable items from China. I said to Diederik (Gommers, head of the ICU department at Erasmus MC, ed.), ‘this isn’t okay, is it?’ He asked me if I could take this on. After that, I started collecting data on how environmentally harmful the tools we use in the ICU are. That sustainability aspect was actually already there. As a pharmacist, I was already focused on using medication more efficiently.”

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Low-hanging fruit

Hunfeld: “In most hospitals, we’ve indeed already gone through the phase of picking the low-hanging fruit. We need to move on. But the difficult part is that this doesn’t always lie within the hospital itself. Many different players in the system need to take action, such as the supplying industry. There is some movement there. Front-runners in the medical device industry are participating in our ESCH-R research, working on reducing material use or developing refurbished equipment. But the pharmaceutical industry is barely moving, if at all. An example is modifying an IV bag so that we can recycle it. That’s not extremely difficult, but the door remains closed. Even something as simple as changing a dosage to reduce waste is challenging. I understand that they can’t just adjust a production line overnight, but you could also say: we’ll do that in three years. Even that isn’t happening.”

Read this interview (in Dutch) with ESCH-R’s Nicole Hunfeld and Wouter Hehenkamp in ZonMW’s Impuls magazine under the section ‘Dialoog’.