Easy Ways To Make Cataract Surgery More Sustainable.

With the ongoing climate crisis we need to reduce the carbon footprint of our health care provision. Each cataract operation produces approximately 181kg Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2Eq). At Sheffield Teaching Hospitals we are committed to reducing our impact.

A UK large teaching hospital proving approximatly 3074 cataract operations a year.

We reviewed our cataract pathway and identified small changes that could be implemented immediately and aimed to quantify both cost and carbon savings. We stopped the routine use of plastic tubing piping medical air under drapes during surgery, only using for claustrophobic patients. The prescription of post operative antibiotic drops for routine operations was stopped and used only for high-risk cases. We suggested a modification for surgeons to use the operating gown to cover the chair arm rests rather than sterile disposable leggings, changed some domestic bin bags to recycling bags and stopped the routine printing of post operative prescriptions, instead using electronic prescribing.

 These changes have been well recieved and tolerated by staff and patients. We calculated that the sum of these savings is approximatly 3.3 tonnes CO2Eq and nearly £22,000 a year, the biggest contributors to this savings are the reduction in antimicrobials prescribed (66% reduction) and the reduction in medical air use (1,075,000 litres).

While big sustainability changes in a large department do take time, we describe some easy changes that can be made that can still result in significant savings.