Smart Safe & Sustainable Hospitals
The Swedish life science sector helps hospitals to be more resilient and sustainable. World-class healthcare architects and planners and companies offering green infrastructure solutions and innovative digital technologies lay the foundation for sustainable, smart and safe care. Innovative medical technology solutions also contribute to efficient and patient-safe advanced healthcare.
The Challenge
Together for a Sustainable Future
Specialized hospital care uses a large share of the available healthcare resources and use potentially harmful products and produce hazardous waste and emissions.
Medical advancements have made treatments more advanced, personalized and often more costly. Staying in a hospital can have negative consequences for a person’s health, e.g. being away from familiar surroundings and faces and the risk of health care-associated infections. Many countries invest heavily in hospitals and healthcare infrastructure. There is thus a pressure for more efficiency in hospital building and operations – from financial, human resource and environmental viewpoints.
Swedish Excellence
Sweden Builds for Sustainability
Swedish hospitals take a holistic view with sustainable buildings and a focus on a healing environment with a patient-centered perspective.
Unnecessary hospitalizations can be avoided through out-patient care and remote follow-up and monitoring. Digitalization supports innovative and smart ways of planning and working, also improving patient flows. Most hospitals have innovation departments and collaboration with academia and industry.
Swedish solutions help hospitals to be more resilient and sustainable. Sweden is home to world-class healthcare architects and planners. Their work, combined with green infrastructure solutions and innovative digital technologies, lays the foundation for sustainable, smart, and safe care. For many years Sweden has been a leading country of innovative medical technology solutions contributing to efficient, qualitative, and patient-safe advanced healthcare.
Quiz
Quiz
100 years is the expected life lenght of the New Karolinska University hospital in Solna, Sweden?
True. Nya Karolinska Solna is intended to last approximately 100 years – although we obviously do not know how the health care will look then.
Does 6% of global carbon dioxide emissions result from N2O?
True. 6% of global carbon dioxide emissions result from N2O, out of this 1% originates from medical use in the healthcare sector.
Does Healthcare in the world’s largest economies account for more than 4% of global emissions?
True. The research found that the combined emissions from hospitals, health services and the medical supply chain across the OECD group of market-based economies, as well as China and India, make up around 4,4% of the global total. This is a larger share than either aviation or shipping.
Do Sweden have 60 regionally-owned public hospitals?
False. Sweden has 70 regionally-owned public hospitals, seven university hospitals, and six private hospitals.
Publications
Latest publications and Swedish actors within this area
Nordic know-how #8 financing energy and climate-smart healthcare
This report addresses the topic of financing energy and climate-smart healthcare, focused specifically on hospitals' green transition in Sweden. It aims to collect, summarise and make accessible different ways to go about and approach such funding.
Visit Nordic Center for Sustainable Healthcare
Best practices of sustainable healthcare in the Nordics
Nordic Know-How 2020 is a report series created by Nordic Center for Sustainable Healthcare (NCSH), within the project Platform for Internationalisation: Energy and Climate Smart Healthcare. The project is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency. This series consists several reports which provide an overview of good examples and best practices of sustainable healthcare in the Nordics. Each report has a certain theme relating to a sustainability challenge in the healthcare sector. The purpose of this series is to bring Nordic practices and knowledge to international actors, spreading Nordic expertise in this field to the world.
Visit Nordic Center for Sustainable Healthcare
Nordic Smart City Roadmap
Promoting principles that honour a more human centric, inclusive and collaborative approach to developing smarter and more sustainable communities. The Nordic Smart City Roadmap provides a framework for smart city work in cities and municipalities both in the Nordics and internationally. Based on common Nordic values such as trust, equality, and co-creation, it will form a narrative of what constitutes a Nordic smart city – making it globally accessible for cities and municipalities around the world to understand and learn from its purposes and qualities. Published 2021.
Nordic Smart City Roadmap
Case
The future of healthcare
View this film presentation of Karolinska University Hospital – one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Patients come to Karolinska from all over Sweden and from other countries. We receive 1.35 million patient visits each year.
