Toolkits

Key Resources

(Shared with the Permission of the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare)

• Centre for Sustainable Healthcare SusQI website
• Step-by-step guide for SusQI projects
• SusQI – Essential Skills for Healthcare Professionals
• Green Champion’s Report Template

What is SusQI?

The SusQI Framework

• • This excellent paper outlines the SusQI framework in great detail.

 

Principles of Sustainable Healthcare

• • In this fantastic paper ‘The Sustainable Physician’, Francis Mortimer describes CSH’s four principles for implementing change in your SusQI project.

 

SusQI: The Triple Bottom Line

• • The triple bottom underpins everything that we do in Sustainable healthcare and should be considered throughout the SusQI process. Follow the link above to find out more.

 

Project Development Template

• • This is the perfect tool to get your SusQI project started. It provides questions to get you thinking and advice on where to use the tools above for each stage of the process.

 

Project Planner

• • This document provides a framework for recording your steps in the SusQI Process as you develop your project.

Study the System

Studying the system is a really important step in any SusQI project. It’s all about identifying the carbon hotspots in your department or service and targeting opportunities to reduce their impact on the triple bottom line.

• Value process mapping overview

Process mapping is a really effective way of breaking a complex system down into its constituent steps. This makes it a lot easier to identify carbon hotspots.

Examples:

• VPM – Outpatient Example
• VPM – Sexual Health Example
• VPM – Unilateral Tinnitus Example

 

The documents below are other fantastic resources that will help you study you system to identify its impact on the triple bottom line.

• Scanning for waste
• Recognising Resource Use
• Scanning for Social impacts resource
• Scanning for Social determinants

 

Design Improvement

Time to make a change! Make it simple, achievable and measurable. The CSH principles should underpin your design improvement and it should consider the impact on the triple bottom line.

• Driver Diagram Template

Examples:

• • Driver Diagram – Anaesthetic Example
  • Driver Diagram – Renal Example
  • Driver Diagram – Diabetes Services
  • Driver Diagram – ICU

 

Measure the Impact

Measuring the financial, social and environmental impacts of a service or pathway is a key element of any SusQI project. This paper has lots of great advice on how this can be achieved.

• Sustainability in quality improvement: measuring impact
• Environmental outcomes carbon footprinting for healthcare
• Measuring Environmental Impacts

Primary care

Greener Practice High Quality and Low Carbon Asthma Care toolkit

• • Toolkit to help UK general practices improve asthma outcomes whilst also reducing carbon emissions
  • It contains step-by-step QI projects, resources such as downloadable searches, educational videos, templates and patient information

 

RCGP Green Impact for Health Toolkit

• • Toolkit to help General Practices make better decisions in this climate and ecological emergency

• GP non-clinical carbon calculator

  • Free online non-clinical carbon footprint calculator for General Practices in the UK to use
  • This calculator measures and identifies the non-clinical greenhouse gas emission hotspots from running GP practices and produces a carbon equivalent footprint

 

• The Anaesthetic Impact Calculator

  • An app to help clinicians understand the impact of regularly used gases (including sevoflurane, isoflurane and desflurane)
  • This calculator allows clinicians to calculate and compare the CO₂e of inhaled anaesthesia agents and carrier gases

 

• Annual Anaesthetic Departmental Calculator

  • An Excel tool that calculates the total CO2e attributable to the volatile agents and nitrous oxide aspect of anaesthetic and analgesic practice