HealthcareLCA

A DATABASE OF ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENTS WITHIN HEALTHCARE

Primum non nocere

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platform summary

HealthcareLCA brings together environmental assessments of health systems, hospitals, healthcare services, surgical procedures, medical equipment, and pharmaceuticals.

What is HealthcareLCA?

From individual pharmaceuticals to entire health systems, researchers around the world are working hard to assess the environmental impacts of different aspects of healthcare. HealthcareLCA serves as an up-to-date repository for this work, bringing together new and existing assessments into one centralised, interactive, and publicly accessible interface.

HealthcareLCA identifies existing healthcare-related life cycle assessments and environmentally-extended input-output analyses, extracts important methodological data and results from these studies, and tabulates these data into an interactive database. We also create charts from the data housed within the database to help visualize and communicate important findings.

In support of a rapid and evidence-based transition toward more sustainable health systems, we allow users to freely view and interact with our data and charts, as long as they meet some basic conditions.

HealthcareLCA aims to provide a valuable resource to the health community. Some of the potential benefits of our platform include:

  • educating health professionals about the environmental impacts of healthcare
  • increasing accessibility and comprehension of available data for policy-makers
  • assisting researchers to identify existing studies that contain useful inventory data or methodological techniques
  • summarising the state of life cycle assessment practice within the health sector, highlighting important gaps in the literature, and aiding new syntheses of the available evidence.

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Platform creation,
maintenance & support

Our story

The HealthcareLCA platform was conceptualized, designed, and developed by Jono Drew in late 2020.

The groundwork for the HealthcareLCA database was laid during 2020 when Jono Drew and colleagues within the Healthy Populations Institute at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada undertook a systematic review of life cycle assessments within surgical services.

Jono then extended this work to encompass the wider healthcare sector, identifying existing healthcare-related environmental assessments through a combined process of citation networking and specific literature searches. From each relevant data source, key methodological data were extracted and tabulated within a database. Jono built the online public-facing platform to host this proprietary dataset, and created a series of interactive charts from the housed data to help communicate pertinent findings.

In mid-2021, Jono began collaborating with Chantelle Rizan who was completing her doctoral studies at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) at that time. Chantelle served in an advisory capacity, and provided input on database updating and refinement. Jono continued to lead backend and frontend database development, and remained solely responsible for the identification of new studies, data extraction, and upload.

At the end of December 2022, the HealthcareLCA website was launched in conjunction with a publication in The Lancet Planetary Health that introduced the platform and summarised the evidence base at that time. Coinciding with this lauch, HealthcareLCA gained formal support via CASCADES, which is a Canadian capacity-building initiative to address healthcare’s contribution to the climate crisis led by the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems (based within the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health) in partnership with the Healthy Populations Institue at Dalhousie University, the Planetary Healthcare Lab at the University of British Columbia, and the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care. CASCADES is funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Climate Action and Awareness Fund for Community-Based Climate Action Projects. This support enabled HealthcareLCA to bring on a part-time data analyst, Sage Mosgrove, to support platform maintenance.

In 2025, HealthcareLCA transitioned to a new support model via Dalhousie University's Centre for Planetary Health & Sustainable Care, which enabled Sage's ongoing contribution. Between June 2025 and December 2025, the National University of Singapore's Centre for Sustainable Medicine (CoSM) kindly provided supplemental funding support for Sage’s continued contribution to the HealthcareLCA platform.

As of 2026, HealthcareLCA is soley supported by Dalhousie University's Centre for Planetary Health & Sustainable Care, but recognises and is greatly appreciative of prior financial support from CASCADES and CoSM, as well as in-kind support from BSMS.

HealthcareLCA remains open to future collaborations and avenues for support. Please get in touch if you are interested in working together. HealthcareLCA endeavours to be as comprehensive as possible. If you are aware of a potentially relevant study that is not already included in our database, or believe that you have found a transcription error, we would appreciate hearing from you.

The creation of HealthcareLCA was not commissioned by any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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