Thursday, 4 August 2022

Health care sustainability

Dr READ (Brunswick) (17:24): (6472) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is for the minister to establish a sustainable health care unit within the Department of Health. Health care is a large and growing sector of the Victorian economy, and nationally it is estimated to account for around 7 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions. Many hospital staff are dismayed at the volume of waste they throw out daily, and this has increased with COVID. They worry too about emissions and the many impacts of global warming on health. I recall seeing a nurse a few years ago throwing out unopened packs containing resuscitation bag and mask kits, worth about $40 each, simply because they had passed their use-by date. She complained that they would probably be fine for another 10 years. She is one of many health workers who want their work to protect and improve health and wellbeing but are increasingly worried that the health sector is part of the problem. Motivated staff are often also frustrated by a number of barriers, including a lack of enthusiasm at some levels of management and uncertainty around questions like what equipment can safely be re-used without risk of infection, and will the energy used in sterilising equipment undo any sustainability gains?

Clinicians and researchers in the Victorian public health system are working together to find answers, but a sustainability unit would coordinate their efforts and turn their work into guidelines for the whole system, maximising the environmental and financial gains. The new health care sustainability unit would harness the considerable purchasing power of the state’s public health system to choose medicines and other products with lower carbon footprints. It would guide all of those things and both drive and monitor our health system’s progress towards decarbonising. The AMA, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the Climate and Health Alliance and Doctors for the Environment Australia, who, by the way, came to visit me last week, have all called for such a unit at both national and state levels, and it makes sense to have a state unit to work with what we hope will be a new federal unit and to liaise with industry and the private health sector.

I applaud the government’s decision to ensure that in future new hospitals will be all electric and that all public hospitals will be powered by renewable energy from 2025, but let us not stop there. The British National Health Service has a sustainable health care unit which is more than paying for itself with the savings it has generated, and I encourage the minister to establish one in Victoria without delay.