Balancing the health benefits and climate mortality costs of haemodialysis.
Future Healthc J
; 10(3): 308-312, 2023 Nov.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38162214
ABSTRACT
Extensive work is underway to quantify the carbon footprint of specific healthcare interventions and identify ways to minimise healthcare-related emissions; however, it remains unclear how to balance the relative benefits from delivering healthcare with the harm from the associated carbon footprint. To estimate emissions-related harms, we used the Mortality Cost of Carbon, a recently developed metric from environmental economics, which presents the impacts of carbon emissions in the form of excess deaths. We convert deaths into years of life lost and compare this with the healthy life years gained, under two temperature scenarios 'Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy Model with an Endogenous Mortality Response' (DICE-EMR) (2.4°C) and 'DICE-Baseline' (4.1°C). As a case study, we use haemodialysis, a life-prolonging intervention with a large carbon footprint. We estimate that 19-53 and 10-25 healthy life years are gained from haemodialysis per year of life lost from the associated emissions in the DICE-EMR and DICE-Baseline scenarios, respectively, depending on the country and treatment regimen. This brings the distribution of harms, benefits and tradeoffs inherent to the decarbonisation of healthcare into sharper focus. More fully accounting for the harm imposed by carbon emissions could result in better value investments to lower the carbon footprint of interventions and support the implementation of the net-zero healthcare agenda.
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Tipo de estudo:
Health_economic_evaluation
Aspecto:
Patient_preference
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Future Healthc J
Ano de publicação:
2023
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Noruega