Quality Improvement and Patient Safety

About Quality Improvement and Patient Safety

Quality improvement and patient safety are increasingly inseparable from environmental sustainability, as healthcare systems cannot achieve high-quality outcomes when care processes contribute to environmental degradation that ultimately undermines population health and system resilience. Many existing improvement initiatives already deliver environmental co-benefits, while sustainability-focused approaches can further enhance safety, efficiency, equity, timeliness, patient-centeredness and overall care quality. 

Quality improvement is well positioned to deliver health system climate action for several reasons. It provides a systematic approach and practical tools to organize point-of-care environmental sustainability efforts using recognized and validated methods. It also offers established spread infrastructure that supports the dissemination and scaling of successful improvements across diverse clinical settings. Because quality improvement interventions are inherently data-driven, they require measurable change, enabling clearer monitoring of environmental and clinical outcomes over time. In addition, quality improvement can create explicit linkages between sustainability and clinical care, embedding environmental considerations within routine decision-making and service redesign. 

CASCADES playbooks and supporting resources provide practical tools to support the integration of sustainability into quality improvement and patient safety work. These resources help teams identify and implement opportunities to reduce environmental impact while strengthening quality improvement across all five dimensions of care, supporting structured implementation, measurement, and shared learning across healthcare settings.