Chapter 6: Climate change and value-based healthcare

Chaojie Liu

Incorporating value-based care approaches into evidence-based practices represents a fundamental paradigm shift in healthcare services. The value of healthcare services can be considered from the perspective of multiple tiers: individual, population and system (Dyakova et al., 2024. Building a resilient and sustainable health system is essential for ensuring universal health coverage that maximises the value of investment in health (Ranabhat et al., 2023). Healthcare services ought to minimise potential harms to patients and society at large while attempting to prevent and treat illness conditions. These harms include not only adverse events for individual patients but also negative impacts at population and environmental levels. For example, investment in a particular health area can benefit a certain population but may deprive resources needed by other people. In the context of climate change, healthcare services may present varying values in terms of their population health benefits and their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. There is a need to curb waste, reduce low-value care and adopt greener tools and approaches (e.g. telehealth) in delivering healthcare (WHO, 2023c).