Our commitment to Sustainable Critical Care

The Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine has four strategic aims which we seek to achieve through education, training and promoting standards. The Faculty Board is committed to developing our strategic aims and include in that, our commitment to sustainable healthcare.

Sustainable critical care should reduce our financial and environmental impact whilst still achieving improvements in patient care. We want an environment worth surviving for and one still worth living in. Sustainable healthcare should not be seen as a peripheral activity conducted by fringe activists. Instead, it should be seen as central to how we all work, in our travel, in our procurement of drugs and equipment and in our overall care of patients. The looming environmental catastrophe beholdens us to promote sustainable healthcare, and also for us to seek to positively influence individual and collective behaviours for the benefit of our patients, their families, their friends and our critical care workforce.

The Faculty will concentrate on the following within its strategic aims:

1. Continue to improve care for our patients and their relatives

• We will work with colleagues in other UK medical Royal Colleges through the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges to promote a healthy environment, as this reduces the risks of critical illness. Clean air reduces the risk of acute severe asthma and exacerbations of chronic lung disease, whilst good waste disposal habits reduce the development of antibiotic resistance.

2. Support and develop the intensive care workforce

• We will promote good working environments and carbon offsetting initiatives. A healthy environment to live, work and play in, is essential to our sense of wellbeing and our mental health.
• By the nature of our work, critical care units are high energy users and high waste producers. We will encourage  changes that can have a major beneficial impact in reducing energy consumption, improving efficiency and reducing waste.

3. Leading intensive care

• Collaboration: We will collaborate with the Royal College of Anaesthetists and other medical UK Royal Colleges to promote sustainable healthcare practices. We will also collaborate with other intensive care professional membership organisations including the Intensive Care Society through their Sustainability Working Group and further afield with ANZICS and their work and initiatives in the sustainability arena.
• Promote hybrid working: We will consider how our Faculty staff work, as well as the need for our meetings and events to take place in person. Some meetings do need to be face to face to be most productive but some can be partially or wholly virtual.

4. Securing the future

• Energy consumption: When we work in the Royal College of Anaesthetists building we will minimise our energy consumption including the use of automatic switches and turning off unused computers.
• Waste: We will minimise our plastic waste, for example coffee cups, lids and water bottles. We will use digital communications rather than print wherever possible.
   

Useful links

1. https://www.medschools.ac.uk/media/2949/education-for-sustainable-healthcare_a-curriculum-for-the-uk_20220506.pdf
2. https://www.baccn.org/static/uploads/resources/ANZICS_Sustainability_Toolkit.pdf
3. https://sustainablehealthcare.org.uk/
4. https://www.rcoa.ac.uk/about-college/strategy-vision/environment-sustainability/sustainability-strategy-2019-2022