Sustainable quality improvement: An essential ingredient for sustainability in modern medical curricula?

Health care delivery contributes a significant carbon footprint in the United Kingdom, and paradoxically climate change is linked to poorer human health outcomes. New General Medical Council (GMC) requirements mandate medical graduates must be able to apply sustainable care to their practice. Implementation of sustainable health care (SHC) teaching is a new challenge for medical schools, and there are several identified barriers including an overcrowded curriculum, lack of expertise within faculties, lack of institutional support and inadequate assessment techniques.

We established a new SHC curriculum spiralling throughout the overall medical curriculum, and as part of this introduced a sustainable quality improvement (susQI) project to our final year cohort. SusQI considers the environmental, social and financial impacts as well as patient and population outcomes. Our students undertook this in their final year GP assistantships.

We sought multi-sourced data through focus groups, formal end of placement feedback, informal feedback and external feedback. We applied thematic analysis to focus group transcriptions and triangulated with the other data sources. We identified some common themes: First, susQI was enjoyed and valuable; second, it allowed meaningful participation; third, it created a co-learning environment; and fourth, timing and curriculum placement are important when integrating susQI.

SusQI can implement SHC into the overcrowded medical curriculum in a low cost, low resource manner without the need for experienced faculty. SusQI is empowering for students and grants them an active team role. Expansion into secondary and tertiary care is feasible, and we contend that susQI can be placed in other health care curricula.