Pioneering Early Mobilisation in a Cardiac Intensive Care unit: a Sustainable Healthcare Initiative

This case study about an early mobilisation project in a cardiac intensive care unit is available on the SusQI website as one of the examples for how sustainability can be embedded into the quality improvement process. 

Healthcare quality improvement projects typically focus on improving clinical outcomes (in this early mobilisation case, ventilation days and intensive care length of stay).  The SusQI framework helps a quality improvement project to also consider environmental, financial and social aspects. 

Even if there isn't time or expertise to do carbon footprinting, the SusQI framework can still be used with other ways to evaluate environmental impact of a quaity improvement project.  For instance, measuring how many items or how much volume of healthcare products are now saved from the project's interventions. 

There are other examples and resources on the SusQI website, such as templates for quality improvement projects, an educator pack and videos on using the SusQI framework:  https://www.susqi.org/

The SusQI approach emphasises the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare's Principles of Sustainable Clinical Practice:  prevention, patient empowerment and self-care, lean clinical pathways and low carbon alternatives.  Early mobilisation of intensive care patients reflects 'prevention' and 'patient empowerment' and is also the 'E' component of the ICU Liberation A-F Bundle to prevent pain, agitation, delirium, immobility and sleep disruption.