Somewhere in your hospital tonight, a machine is purifying water nobody will drink, an operating theatre is ventilating an empty room, and a delivery lorry is carrying a single-use instrument half way across a country. None of this will make the news. All of it adds up — to 4.4% of the world's emissions, from a sector whose entire purpose is to do no harm.
We built this site because of a frustration you may recognise. The people who care about this — the anaesthetist who wonders about her gases, the renal nurse who watches the water go down the drain, the GP signing a hundred prescriptions a day — are told two things. Either “the planet is burning, act now”, or “here is a 90-page strategy document”. Neither helps a department decide what to do on Monday morning.
What we believe
- The patient comes before the tonne. Always. No action on this site is worth a worse outcome for a single patient. Where carbon and care collide, care wins — and we say so explicitly, on every page.
- Clinicians deserve numbers, not slogans. A department that can see its savings can defend its budget. Evidence, graded honestly, with the study linked — that is respect.
- Honesty includes the bad news. We publish the studies where green policies backfired. If a switch loses its savings to worse outcomes, we print that beside the recommendation. A ledger that only shows favourable numbers is marketing.
- Nobody should carry this alone. A patient on home dialysis who feels guilt about their treatment waste — that is a failure of us, not of them. The burden belongs to systems, not to the sick.
Why this domain
greenerhealthcare.org is not a blank space. From 2009 to 2016 it carried the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare; before that, the 10:10 campaign's health checklists that hundreds of GP surgeries actually used. We are not them, and we do not claim their work. But a domain with that history owes something: continuity of purpose. So the tradition continues — practical, department-level, measurable — run now by an independent team that answers to the evidence and to you.
How we can help
- Every department page is a starting audit: what to measure first, where the savings actually are, and what each action is worth in tonnes
- Every number carries its evidence grade and its source. If you need to convince a budget holder, the citation is already there
- When your department measures a real reduction, send it in — reader-submitted entries earn their own lines, with your names on them
The promise
One thing, held absolutely: we will never publish a number we cannot source, and we will never let an environmental target override a clinical judgement. Those are the two failures that would make this site worthless. Everything else — the design, the languages, the coverage — is negotiable and improving.
The ledger is open. Read it, check it, argue with it. That is exactly what it is for.