ClimAte neutRal INitiatives for GrowiNg heAlTh and care Unmet REquirements

Project Information

CARING NATURE

Grant agreement ID: 101137340

DOI

10.3030/101137340

EC signature date 29 November 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• Health

Total cost

€ 6 024 842,50

EU contribution

€ 5 999 517,50

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CARING NATURE (ClimAte neutRal INitiatives for GrowiNg heAlTh and care Unmet REquirements)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The healthcare sector is responsible for 4-5% of global Greenhouse Gases emissions and the projected yearly emissions of this sector from now to 2050 will dramatically increase if a green transition is not immediately undertaken. However, implementing it swiftly, cost-effectively and maintaining optimal care delivery processes remains a challenge.
The EU-funded CARING NATURE project aims to facilitate this shift. Comprising SMEs, industries and universities, the project develops 10 innovative, easy to deploy and economically sustainable solutions to implement 5 objectives: to increase the green transition governance capability, to reduce the environmental impact of buildings’ construction, renovation and energy demand, to reduce/valorise the medical, food and water waste, to reduce the environmental impact of patient travel due to outpatient/primary care delivery, to obtain staff engagement in the green transition of the Healthcare Providers.
To validate them and to collect evidence to promote adoption across Europe, the solutions will be demonstrated in 36 use cases in 5 healthcare organizations from five different European countries. Moreover, since its beginning, the project has set-up a Reference Stakeholder Group including 50+ members from different stakeholders’ group to get their support in disseminating the project’s results. CARING NATURE also plans to create a specific website for dissemination and exploitation purposes consisting in a virtual green hospital showcasing the different solutions of the project. Moreover, the project includes a task dedicated to the identification and promotion of ideas for standardization related to the project’s solutions.
CARING NATURE leverages the social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines, about environmental LCA, social LCA, Lifecycle Cost-LCC, social and organization science, humanities, education, investment evaluation, standardization, ethics, communication, Nature Based approach, brought by eight partners. At project’s midlife, important results based on SSH include the knowledge sharing model, the multidimensional investment evaluation model, the participatory staff engagement for green transition model based on Communities of Practice (CoP), the green lean sis sigma for healthcare methodology.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project, as planned, in the first reporting period (M1-M18), has performed three main activities: scope finetuning, development, use in real context. In the first six months has finetuned and enriched the solutions’ requirements, based on filling structured requirement collection forms, one to one meetings between the developers (partners acting as developers) and the five end-user partners, identification of the key applicable norms and standards (and five workshops (one per objective) with the Reference Stakeholder Group (RSG). And has also identified more precisely the use cases and defined the validation methodology.
From the sixth month, the project has developed the 10 solutions, which are articulated In a total of 29 components. The plan was to complete a prototype by M18: this has been fully achieved for 27 of the components (93%). It was also planned to start implementing use cases for each solutions, for a total of 12: at M18, 5 of them have been completed, 7 are in progress.
From the scientific point of view, three datasets have been produced from laboratory testing (related to pyrolysis plant, food-waste treatment process and wastewater treatment process) and five articles have been published (related to operating rooms clinical waste management and to environmental impact governance methodologies)

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

CARING Nature has delivered so far prototypes of seven solutions aiming at directly reducing the environmental impact (primary results), and of three solutions aiming at driving and enabling their adoption (enabling results). The primary results include: decision support system for sustainable building construction or renovation, AI-powered decision support system for energy management, guidelines for medical waste reduction in Operating Rooms, on-site pyrolysis plant to treat medical waste in the hospital avoiding transport to external incinerators, on-site waste food anaerobic digestion & drying processes, on-site waste water anaerobic digestion process, guidelines to facilitate the adoption of device-assisted tele-visit a software-supported tele-rehabilitation. The enabling results include: knowledge sharing (based on a new taxonomy of the actions for green transitions) and decision support system (based on Lifecycle Assessment and EU CSRD-compliant reporting, Lean Six Sigma methodology customized to hospital clinical pathways and environmental and social impact reduction, participatory staff engagement model compliant with the healthcare workers perspective. The validity of the chain from activity/project to output/results to outcome to impact described in the project’s proposal is confirmed.
The first reason is that even if at M18 the output/results are still in a prototype configuration, there are promising signals of the fact that the impact of the project’s output can be achieved, because 6 of the 7 primary results have already shown performances in line or better than those indicated in the KPIs and targets iin the Grant Agreement. In general, the solutions reduce the environmental impact and are economically sustainable, For instance, according to the feasibility study in a real end user context, the use of the pyrolysis plant in the hospital premises not only reduces the CO2e emissions of 68% (mainly by eliminating the high-temperature incineration), but also has a payback period of less than 4 months, primarily by eliminating the cost of outsourced hazardous waste transport (275 km to the incinerator) and treatment services.
The second reason is that the project is setting-up the conditions to promote adoption, e.g. through the creation and use of the RSG, which includes the types of stakeholder relevant for the future adoption; 4 topics as starting point for standardization have been identified, and with the expertise of DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) there is a good basis for aiming to at least 1 new/improved standard after the end of the project; the first use of CoP approach at WPH (Wellbeing services county of Päijät-Häme) has shown its staff engagement power; The KSS is being conceptually and technically structured to facilitate collection and sharing knowledge among the researchers, which should ensure proper quality of content, in particular if EUR (Erasmus University of Rotterdam) manages the KSS platform.