Specialty Care

About Specialty Care

Specialty care encompasses a diverse range of clinical services that support the diagnosis, treatment, and ongoing management of complex health conditions. These include laboratory medicine and anatomical pathology, internal medicine, perioperative services, kidney care, and respiratory therapies. While essential to high-quality healthcare delivery, these services are often resource-intensive, relying on specialized equipment, pharmaceuticals, energy, water, and single-use materials. As a result, specialty care contributes meaningfully to the environmental footprint of healthcare systems at a time when climate change is increasingly affecting both population health and system resilience.

Across specialties, common sustainability challenges are emerging. These include unnecessary testing and procedures, high-emission technologies, inefficient use of resources, and avoidable waste generation. Such practices not only increase environmental impact but can also contribute to higher costs and unnecessary strain on health system capacity. Improving sustainability in specialty care therefore involves both reducing low-value activities and enhancing the efficiency and environmental performance of care that must be delivered.

Meaningful progress requires coordinated action across clinical practice, operations, and system design. Evidence-based decision-making, education, and clinician engagement are essential to identifying opportunities for improvement and supporting practice change. Infrastructure, procurement systems, and data-driven quality improvement processes further enable the adoption of more sustainable approaches, while collaboration across disciplines ensures solutions are practical, safe, and scalable.

CASCADES playbooks and supporting resources bring together evidence-informed tools to support the integration of environmental sustainability across primary and community care pathways. These resources support change at both clinical and system levels, including prescribing practices, models of care, and quality improvement approaches. They are designed to support implementation, evaluation, and scaling of sustainability initiatives, helping teams translate environmental principles into everyday primary and community care delivery.