The Ethical Duty to Reduce the Ecological Footprint of Industrialized Healthcare Services and Facilities

Abstract

According to the widely accepted principles of beneficence and distributive justice, I argue that healthcare providers and facilities have an ethical duty to reduce the ecological footprint of the services they provide. I also address the question of whether the reductions in footprint need or should be patient-facing. I review Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce’s claim that achieving ecological sustainability in the healthcare sector requires rationing the treatment options offered to patients. I present a number of reasons to think that we should not ration health care to achieve sufficient reductions in a society’s overall consumption of ecological goods. Moreover, given the complexities of ecological rationing, I argue that there are good reasons to think that the ethical duty to reduce the ecological footprint of health care should focus on only nonpatient-facing changes. I review a number of case studies of hospitals who have successfully retrofitted facilities to make them more efficient and reduced their resource and waste streams.

Health-care systems' resource footprints and their access and quality in 49 regions between 1995 and 2015: an input–output analysis

“…There are ethical reasons to argue that the reduction of health-care's environmental footprint should not be patient-facing. 42 Here, we develop two parallel strategies that could be followed to reduce health-care systems' footprint with neutral or positive impacts on health.…”

Practices Pursuing the Sustainability of A Healthcare Organization: A Systematic Review

“…The research was conducted with the implementation of the systematic review methodology to achieve the aim of the paper [7], as the study is devoted to filling in the gap in the existing literature by determining, analyzing, and summarizing the previously obtained results regarding the efficient mechanisms of shifting towards a sustainable way of organizing and managing healthcare organizations' activities, which in turn leads to reaching the SDGs. Additionally, recent papers have suggested studying organizations' social, economic, and environmental practices that lead to an increase in the overall level of sustainability [8][9][10][11][12].…”

“…Moreover, sustainability is seen through its creators, such as society, and cocreators, such as stakeholders, who follow their beliefs, social and ethical norms, personal interests, rules, and regulations to determine the level of sustainability [9,[35][36][37][38]. Additionally, it should be mentioned that the main factors affecting the overall attitude and behavior towards nature are not constant, but are being constantly modified to increase the level of health and well-being under continuous local and global economic, social, technological, and environmental changes [31,[39][40][41].…”

The Economic Value of Natural Resources and Its Implications for Pakistan’s Economic Growth

“…Second, the greater use of energy in industrial production increases the country' economic growth, which helps them utilize natural resources as raw material in industrial production and would enable to obtain foreign reserves for the country. However, the earlier literature shows the concerns of ecological footprints and biowaste, leading the economic growth towards worsening due to compromising healthcare sustainability agenda [60][61][62][63]. In this regard, the study attracted more inbound FDI in cleaner production technologies to offset the adverse effects of industrial pollution, leading to improved economic development.…”