A Beacon Site for environmentally sustainable health care

SusQi Established Beacon Site

The School of Medicine at The University of Notre Dame Australia is a SusQI Beacon Site for the Centre for Sustainable Health Care (CSH).

As a Beacon Site, UNDA has been recognised as an organisation that has integrated environmental sustainability into the way we educate and train our students and staff in Quality Improvement.

A Beacon Site is accredited by the Centre for Sustainable Health Care in Oxford, United Kingdom. The CSH is a leading program Centre for sustainable healthcare research and practice.

Quality Improvement is an important practice that continually enhances the quality and safety of care provided to patients in our hospitals, healthcare institutions and to the community. The CSH has developed Sustainable Quality Improvement (SusQI), which incorporates environmental sustainability as an aim of quality improvement projects and other aspects of clinical practice. SusQI provides practical tools that enable health professionals to contribute to the necessary and inevitable transition of the health system to low carbon and waste delivery.

As a Beacon Site, UNDA is training health professionals to design and implement SusQI projects– quality improvement projects that reduce the environmental impact of health care.

Professor Lynne Madden, Professor of Population and Planetary Health at UNDA, is leading the team that includes Dr Kerry Sutcliffe, Dr Claudia Ng, Dr Aswan Tai and Ms Holley Jones. They are developing SusQI training using the training resources developed by the CSH. This training was first delivered in the Environmental Sustainability and Health Care Systems course in the Graduate Certificate in Environmentally Sustainable Health. Through a Commonwealth Government grant administered by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, training is currently available as a short course to Australian physician trainees and their supervisors.

UNDA is committed to supporting students and staff in taking concrete action to achieve environmental sustainability. The Laudato Si Action Platform, which supports Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, is recognised in the UNDA Strategic Plan 2022-2026.

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