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A Sustainable Mind - environment & sustainability podcast

085: Sustainable Healthcare with Dr. Rosie Spooner

A Sustainable Mind - environment & sustainability podcast

Marjorie Alexander

Society & Culture, Science, Nature

4.6 • 588 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dr. Rosie Spooner is a British Pediatrician who is currently an Education Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare, an NGO working on mainstreaming sustainability practices into planning and delivery of health services. Rosie is a practicing clinician who works alongside medical schools and postgraduate education programs to support the integration of sustainable healthcare into mainstream healthcare teaching. She became more concerned about the connection between the climate emergency and health after a year sailing with her husband on a 12-meter boat for 12,000 miles, crossing the Atlantic twice. On this journey she saw how climate change is already destabilizing the world's natural systems and witnessed the catastrophic effects this can have on human health. She is a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and has campaigned for them to divest from fossil fuel investments and declare a climate emergency.


Today's Sponsors: 

Brightmark is on a mission to reimagine waste, transforming organic waste into renewable natural gas and creating innovative approaches to plastics renewal. Learn more at Brightmark.com.

Tentree is an earth-first sustainable clothing company. Check out their selection of eco-friendly clothing and accessories at Tentree.com and use promo code 'ASM' for 15% off your first purchase.


In this episode Marjorie and Dr. Rosie discuss:

  • How delivering healthcare impacts the environment and what some health professionals are doing to reduce the impacts
  • What role patients and clients play in the sustainability of the healthcare
  • How hygiene and infection control practices impact both sustainability and patient comfortability
  • The complexities of transitioning to more earth-conscious healthcare strategies when product availability and contracts dictate much of the reusable and disposable supplies


Resources mentioned in today's episode:

 

Connect with Dr. Rosie Spooner and the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare:

  

Connect with Marjorie Alexander:

Interested in sponsoring or supporting A Sustainable Mind? Visit our sponsorship page at ASustainableMind.com/sponsor!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

It's the hydrofluorocarbone that propels it, and the canister inside it has that.

0:05.0

And that's what means that it's so damaging to the atmosphere.

0:08.5

What's interesting in the inhalers discussion is that within Europe, the UK is one of the highest

0:14.2

prescribers of these meat dose inhalers, the push-down inhalers.

0:18.9

And other countries in Europe don't use them so much,

0:21.6

but they don't have worse outcomes for their asthma care.

0:25.6

So one of the things that we were looking at is why do we prescribe,

0:28.9

of all of our prescriptions, about 70% are these propellant inhalers,

0:33.3

whereas in Sweden or Denmark they're about 10%.

0:36.9

But they don't have worse outcomes in terms of their health outcomes for respiratory illness.

0:41.3

So we've really had a big push within our healthcare system to try to shift away from them unless it's necessary.

0:50.3

So it's sort of like questioning how much we really do need those, the propellant ones.

0:55.5

Sometimes they're really necessary, and this shouldn't be about kind of blaming anyone for using propellant inhaler.

1:01.3

It's just about having that open discussion about whether those propellant inhalers can be replaced with something that doesn't damage the environment.

1:10.8

This is a sustainable mind where we interview the minds behind today's most impactful

1:16.2

environmental campaigns, organizations, and startups, inspiring the environmental changemakers

1:22.4

of tomorrow.

1:24.4

Today's episode is brought to you by Brightmark.

1:29.8

Brightmark is a leader in waste of fuel and plastic renewal technologies. Their mission is to create a world without waste by reimagining

1:36.4

waste with a holistic, closed loop and circular economy approach to tackling the planet's most

1:42.4

pressing environmental challenges. We had a conversation with Bob Powell, founder and CEO of Brightmark, earlier this year,

1:50.0

and you can listen to that interview in Episode 81.

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