Addressing the environmental sustainability of eye health-care delivery: a scoping review

'The demand for eye care—the most common medical speciality in some countries—is increasing globally due to both demographic change and the development of eye health-care services in low-income and middle-income countries. This expansion of service provision needs to be environmentally sustainable. We conducted a scoping review to establish the nature and extent of the literature describing the environmental costs of delivering eye-care services, identify interventions to diminish the environmental impact of eye care, and identify key sustainability themes that are not yet being addressed'.

John C Buchan, Cassandra L Thiel, Annalien Steyn, John Somner, Rengaraj Venkatesh, Matthew J Burton, Jacqueline Ramke,
Addressing the environmental sustainability of eye health-care delivery: a scoping review,The Lancet Planetary Health,Volume 6, Issue 6,
2022,Pages e524-e534.

Key messages:

• A small body of work has emerged since 2009 focusing on the environmental impact of eye care
• Clinical services with similar safety profiles and outcomes have very different environmental consequences depending on the regulatory frameworks in which they exist 
• When designing policies and services, we suggest that thresholds should be applied to the amount of environmental damage that is acceptable per quality adjusted life year gained