P2B347: Plotting the Path to Net Zero Pediatric Healthcare: Is System-wide Mindfulness the Game Changer?

Background: Today, climate change poses more threat to human health, safety and security than ever before. With greenhouse gas emissions soaring year-on-year, there is a swiftly growing evidence-base for poor pediatric health outcomes due to these gases. Pediatricians have a unique opportunity to address climate change concerns, in order to bring benefit to the lives of children now and for future generations. The U.S. healthcare sector contributes approximately 10% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (Eckelman and Sherman, 2016). As greenhouse gases directly influence climate change, this project focussed on addressing factors that can help reduce emissions in pediatric clinical practice.

Methods: The primary research involved in this project was undertaken in a two-part process. Part one, involved purposive and snowballing sampling to recruit participants (n=32) for semi-structured interviews. Participants were from a range of stakeholder groups including healthcare professionals, and individuals working in the healthcare procurement, leadership and supply chain sectors. This maximized perspectives from experts in inter-related healthcare fields.

Part two, of the methodology entailed conducting surveys to gather pediatricians’ opinions on net zero by employing Likert scale questions. Questions also asked pediatricians (n=12) if they were aware of the net zero definition, their level of interest in learning about it, barriers they felt exist to achieving net zero, as well as solutions.

Results: Analysis from stakeholder interviews revealed four meta-themes: value-based healthcare, organizational behavior and culture, supply chain model and physician awareness.

Feedback from pediatricians demonstrated that 3% of clinicians were able to correctly define net zero. 0% of participants were taught about healthcare sustainability at medical school. However, 100% of them expressed having wished they learnt about it during undergraduate training, with an 83.3% interest in participating in sustainability initiatives. 58.3% of participants were not aware of any current sustainability initiatives at their workplace. Physician-identified barriers towards achieving net zero included reduced time to dedicate to sustainability projects, over-burden of clinical responsibilities, insufficient departmental funding, and lack of staff support and sustainability targets. Physician-identified solutions to these barriers, included creating a rota schedule to allocate time to work on ‘green’ initiatives, and appointing a ‘Sustainability Champion’ to encourage and assist team members to partake in projects. Clinicians indicated that they would find it helpful to receive educational training to increase their mindfulness in decision-making processes to lower their carbon footprint.

Conclusion: Findings support the significance of facilitating pediatricians to form mindfulness practices. This can be achieved by devising whole-team approaches to ensure healthcare sustainability awareness is fully integrated and advocated for, across pediatric departments. Practical solutions should be implemented with adequate resource allocation to enable sustainability projects to be completed. Future studies may explore the impact of introducing such interventions by measuring departmental carbon savings.