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Green Surgery Report: Areas for Future Research and Development

Expanding the evidence base for effective action to reduce the carbon footprint of surgical care

Read Section 8 of the Green Surgery Report

Section Highlights

The James Lind Alliance ‘Greener Operations’ Priority Setting Partnership identified questions or topics that people want researchers to investigate, to help reduce the environmental impact of operations.

Further research is needed to evaluate the role of surgical disease prevention, minimising unwarranted variation, de-adoption of low value care, and digital technologies, in relation to sustainable surgery.

There is need to evaluate the relative contribution of different mitigation strategies to model how to achieve net zero surgical care, and understand the scale and requirements of resources change to facilitate transition to sustainable surgery.

We need to understand how surgical care services can adapt to climate change.

Research is needed on how to increase scale and spread of sustainable surgery innovations.

Section Recommendations

(1) Conduct further research to evaluate ways to improve sustainability of surgical care