College publications making transition to digital

Surgical News will follow the ANZ Journal of Surgery move to digital

The Lancet Commission on climate and health has previously called for the healthcare community to take a leadership role in advocating for emission reductions, and to critically examine its own activities with respect to their effects on human and environmental health.

As an organisation RACS supported these calls, and in recent years the environmental sustainability of surgical practice has become an increasing advocacy priority for RACS. In 2020, we developed an Environmental Sustainability in Surgical Practice Working Party (ESSPWP). Before this the College published a position paper on the Environmental Impacts of Surgical Practice. The position paper states: RACS recommends surgeons and hospitals consider the principles of effective waste management to take suitable steps to reduce the impact of surgery on the environment.

One suggested approach is to implement initiatives underpinned by the five Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rethink, Research. The College has previously mailed out more than 8000 copies of Surgical News on a bi-monthly basis. Each copy is placed in a plastic sleeve and mailed out across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. How many of these are discarded to landfill without being opened is uncertain. Plastic, which gets from landfill to oceans has catastrophic impact. The ESSPWP, therefore believes that transitioning Surgical News into a predominantly digital format provides a practical example of how RACS is taking tangible steps to implement the actions promoted in our position paper. Given that healthcare in Australia contributes seven per cent to pollution and surgical practice a major part of that, the ESSPWP expects that small actions such as this one, will be just the beginning of setting longer term actions and goals. Everyone’s reading habits are different, and there may be some RACS members who prefer a physical copy of the magazine. The College has provided an option to continue mailing out physical copies to those who request it. However, if the recent transition of the ANZ Journal of Surgery is any indication, we do not anticipate the number of these requests to be significant. There is debate as to whether a purely digital magazine will reduce emissions— given that digital magazines produce CO2 from their electricity use and storage. This difference is difficult to measure and even if it turned out to be of only small benefit, other considerations in going digital are the major reduction in waste decomposing in landfill and the reduction in volume of emissions from transporting the magazines. Given that Surgical News is already published and stored online for nearly a decade, extending the publication to be exclusively digital can only result in a reduction in emissions. Furthermore, this argument over the use of electricity underlines the importance of advocating for the increased use of renewable energy wherever possible. We would recommend to everyone an excellent article from the July-August 2021 issue of Surgical News written by Melbourne anaesthetist, Dr Forbes McGain. In this article Dr McGain outlines the significant reduction in carbon emissions, which can be achieved simply by generating our energy from a higher concentration of renewable sources.

We would like to thank those who supported the proposed digital transition of Surgical News. We look forward to providing further updates on the work of the ESSPWP in the future issues of Surgical News and would encourage anyone who would like to know more or become involved in the working party to contact the RACS Policy and Advocacy team.

Emeritus Professor David Fletcher AM FRACS RACS.Advocacy@surgeons.org

On behalf of the RACS Environmental Sustainability in Surgical Practice Working Party