Levi Symposium: The Value(s) of Disposability in Health Care

On 12 and 13 November 2024, project team members attended a symposium and colloquium on trade-offs of safety, efficacy, efficiency, and sustainability in healthcare. 

Roughly 80 percent of healthcare’s oversized carbon footprint derives from the production, transportation, use, and disposal of a single-use medical supply chain. Yet as health care organisations try to move away from single-use disposable items toward sustainable use of durable items – they encounter widespread perception that disposability is a necessary virtue in modern health care. Caregivers, patients, and health-system managers fear that any move from disposability to sustainability must lead to trade-offs in safety (from infectious threats), efficacy (in pharmaceutical delivery) or efficiency (in cost-effectiveness and/or access to care). 

The Levi Symposium questioned these perceived trade-offs, disentangling legitimate evidential and moral reasoning from the inertia of convenience. Convening scholars and practitioner in bioethics, clinical practice,  environmental justice, social science, practice innovation, and health policy, the symposium facilitated a multi-disciplinary exploration of how we can elucidate policy pathways that harmonise clinical safety, efficacy, and efficiency with sustainability.

Thank you to our hosts: the Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Centre for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine.

Watch the animated trailer and learn more.