Sustainable health

摘要

Climate change continues to be at the forefront of the news agenda so this podcast takes a timely lookatthe environment. Amongthe interviewees is Gillian Leng, deputy chief executive and director of health and social care atthe National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). She wonders if we should be doing more to evaluate the impact that treatments have on the planet: "What we haven't got at the moment is a really good way of measuring the environmental impact of drugs and Pharmaceuticals, which would let us draw comparisons. I'd really like to be able to encourage the industry to start recording that and perhaps at some point in the future NICE could build it into our appraisal. Whether [a treatment's] impact on the environment would ever override the benefits to patients is debatable, but it might be one of the factors that makes clinicians choose one thing over another."