[Anesthesiologists' self-reported sustainable attitudes and practices to mitigate climate change]

Healthcare systems are a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In hospitals, the areas with the greatest environmental impact are anesthetic-surgical practice and intensive care. The aim of the study was to identify self-reported sustainable practices and attitudes of anesthesiologists at a public university hospital, their opinion on priority practices and barriers to their implementation.

A cross-sectional study was carried out using an anonymous self-administered questionnaire adapted from an internationally validated instrument. All anesthesiology staff at the aforementioned hospital were invited to participate. Descriptive statistics and bivariate analysis using prevalence ratios were used.

The participation rate was 71.6% (44 specialists and 4 residents). The most frequent sustainable practices were the choice of anesthetic gases according to their environmental impact and the use of prefilled drug syringes (58.3%). A total of 85.4% expressed a desire to recycle, although only 22.9% reported actually doing so. The majority (95.8%) considered that the environmental impact of products should be taken into account; however, 52.1% indicated that their knowledge to do so was insufficient. It was observed that women were less likely to consider carbon footprint when choosing inhalation anesthetics; this effect was statistically significant. For the rest of the factors analyzed, the variations did not reach statistical significance.

Although there is a predisposition to consider sustainable practices in Anesthesiology, their implementation is scarce. This highlights the urgency of improving the environmental training of professionals, developing multilevel strategies to facilitate individual decisions, encouraging support of decision-makers, and creating participatory environmental hospital goals.