Sustainability: a key concept in leadership and service development

Sustainable healthcare moves beyond a concept of cost-effectiveness to consider the social and environmental costs of healthcare. These costs are large and can be addressed by being brought into discussions around service design and quality improvement.

The issues are of increasing importance not only as a result of climate change, but also because rising demand and capacity issues in mental health services require a different, less intensive approach to managing mental illness.

Using two complementary frameworks, the Triple Bottom Line and the Four Principles of Sustainable Healthcare, this module sets out to explain how key sustainability issues relate to mental healthcare, and crucially how psychiatrists can evaluate the sustainability of their clinical practice.

Finally, this module explores some changes that psychiatrists can make to improve the sustainability of their services for the benefit of patients and staff, today and in the future.