Impacts & Benefits

• Built University’s teaching and training capacity related to sustainability in health systems quality improvement.
• Delivered major environmental outcomes, avoiding approximately 3,700 tCO₂e, diverting 69 tonnes of waste and keeping more than 800,000 items from landfill.
• Generated almost $3 million in site-reported savings across participating projects over four years.
• Supported 76 staff-led sustainability projects, including 44 projects across the first three years and 32 in the 2025/26 round.
• Reduced low-value resource use in healthcare, including unnecessary IV fluids, PPE, blood gas sampling, oral nutrition supplements and single-use items.
• Improved care quality and staff capability, with projects reducing unnecessary interventions, improving clinical decision-making and strengthening sustainable quality improvement skills.

Leadership & Engagement

• Built a practical university–health service partnership model, combining University of Melbourne coordination oversight, training and measurement support with local health service leadership.
• Expanded from one health service to eight, including the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
• Embedded Sustainability in Quality Improvement training, including a full-day SusQI workshop, attended by 44 participants in 2025.
• Supported cross-site learning and replication, using shared resources, case studies, judging, recognition and published project examples.
• Influenced broader healthcare sustainability programs, inspiring the Safer Care Victoria and Climate Health Victoria SQuDs-ED program and further bespoke SusQI training.
• Facilitated preparation of health services for the mandatory introduction of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care’s Healthcare Sustainability and Resilience Module.

Wider Societal Impact

• Contributed to lower-impact healthcare, helping services reduce emissions, waste and unnecessary resource use while maintaining or improving quality of care.
• Created community benefit through reuse and donation, including food recycling, ice pack reuse and partnerships supporting people with disability.
• Built workforce capability for sustainable healthcare, equipping clinical and non-clinical staff with skills increasingly needed across health systems.
• Normalised sustainability as part of quality care, showing that environmental improvement can align with patient safety, cost reduction and better clinical practice.
• Created a scalable model beyond Victoria, with tools, training and published learnings relevant to health services and learning providers nationally.