And yet, globally, the health care sector is responsible for four to five percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. We run round-the-clock operations, we consume vast quantities of energy and water, we generate hazardous and non-hazardous waste in volumes most industries would find indefensible. The very institutions that exist to protect human health are, collectively, one of the largest contributors to the environmental harm that undermines it.
That is the paradox at the heart of modern medicine, and it is no longer one we can leave for someone else to resolve. In 2025, the National University Hospital, Singapore (NUH) became the first hospital in the world to receive the Healthcare Sustainability Certification, awarded jointly by the Joint Commission International and the International Hospital Federation’s Geneva Sustainability Centre. I share that not as a victory lap, but because the certification has clarified, for me, what kind of leadership challenge sustainability really is.
It is not a side project. It is not a marketing line. It is a test of whether we can build hospitals that are advanced in every sense of the word.
There is a stubborn assumption in our sector that going green means trading something off — that environmental responsibility comes at the cost of clinical performance, infection control or innovation. Our experience has been the opposite. Many of the most consequential sustainability decisions we have made have also been the most clinical and operationally sound.
They have made care safer, cheaper and better, not worse. Consider anesthetic gases. In 2021, we began the transition away from desflurane, an anesthetic gas with a global-warming potential 2,590 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
By switching to sevoflurane, which is about twenty times less harmful, and the intravenous alternative propofol, where clinically appropriate, we saved more than 1,900 tons of CO2 emissions and over $577,000 in costs between April 2021 and March 2023. That is roughly the equivalent of taking 680 cars off the road. Importantly, no patient outcome was compromised.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
