At the HealthPathways Conference in Brisbane in May, community members presented on a broad range of topics. In her presentation Planetary health, climate change and HealthPathways, Dr Sarah Mollard, Lead Clinical Editor for Mid and North Coast Community HealthPathways, shared her passion for planetary health and how HealthPathways can play a role in reducing and mitigating climate change. 

“My interest in planetary health is deeply connected to my personal experience as a parent. And also my experience as a doctor in terms of those health impacts I've seen in my community,” Dr Mollard said.

Understanding and responding to the impacts of human disruptions to the Earth's natural systems on human health and all life on earth is a key focus in the field of planetary health.

The impacts of climate change have been apparent in Australia over the last few years. Dr Mollard highlighted a change in the pattern of these events. “We're seeing multiple, compounding, cascading disasters that are interrupting the preparation response and recovery cycle that we've traditionally thought about in disaster response.”

She pointed to the period of 2019–2022, where Australia saw bush fires followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by major flooding across the East Coast of Australia.

Climate events have direct impacts on human health. However, Dr Mollard said the indirect impacts are also important. She highlighted increased rates of infectious diseases, malnutrition, and noncommunicable diseases as well as mental health and psychosocial health impacts. 

Climate change also puts the health system itself under increased stress. “This could be due to damage to infrastructure from disasters or due to an impact on short and long-term staffing levels, as well as from interruptions to preventative care.”

Climate change is having a significant impact on health and the health system, and carbon emissions from health care is a significant driver of the problem. Worldwide, 5% of global emissions come from healthcare. 

Dr Mollard referred to a Deloitte report outlining three main categories of action - mitigation, adaptation, and transformation, which are all centred around the idea of equity for healthy people, communities, and a healthy planet.

One of the key opportunities to reduce the carbon emissions of health care is through HealthPathways because of the capacity to influence quality of care.

“We could reduce clinical care emissions by 40% simply by avoiding harmful and low value care.”

Ensuring pathways discourage the use of unnecessary investigations or interventions is a simple way to move clinicians away from low value care.

“One MRI is the equivalent of driving 122 kilometres in an average car and we know that HealthPathways can reduce the number of MRIs ordered, thanks to evidence from our colleagues from Cardiff and Vale.”

Dr Mollard explained that a recent evaluation found that HealthPathways can play a role as an enabler of integrated care. “That means supporting the coordination of processes of service delivery across all three of these levels simultaneously. And during Covid, we actually showed that we could do this even when the health system was under stress.”

In practice, this might mean looking for ways that HealthPathways can support more care being provided in primary care settings at home or in telehealth.

“Hospitals make up a huge chunk of the health care emissions so anything that we can use to move from hospital-based care, back into community-based care, is going to be cutting emissions.”

Prescriptions are another big emitter and HealthPathways can also work to reduce unnecessary prescriptions. “There's an enormous amount of prescribing that might either be inappropriate prescribing, or it might be prescribing medications that never actually get used by patients. We know an awful lot of that occurs. Each time that we write a prescription, and it gets filled at the chemist and taken home and doesn't get used, there's a cascade of unnecessary emissions.”

Dr Mollard issued a challenge to the HealthPathways Community to take some time when developing pathways to think of how they can be used to take action on climate change.

Find out more

If you’re a member of the HealthPathways Community and would like to engage more with this topic, you can join or start a discussion in the HealthPathways Community Forum, or contact your community success manager.

If you’d like to know more about HealthPathways, or if your health jurisdiction hasn’t yet joined the HealthPathways Community: 

• See HealthPathways Global for an overview  
• Email info@healthpathwaysglobal.org or phone: 
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