On 1 October the Malmö Arena Hotel hosts the eighth edition of the Nordic Conference on Sustainable Healthcare. The room it fills is a working one: clinicians, sustainability leads, procurement officers, regional health authorities, researchers and the companies that sell into all of them. The Nordic Center for Sustainable Healthcare (NCSH) has spent eight years building the event into one of the region’s main meeting points on the environmental footprint of health and care, and last year’s edition drew more than 450 people from over 25 countries. The 2026 programme sticks to the practical levers: measurement and reporting, procurement, structural decarbonisation and climate resilience, cleaning up supply chains, prevention and innovation.

Brett Duane is among the confirmed speakers. Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin, he coordinates KitNewCare, the Horizon Europe project using kidney care as a working model for how a health system might become environmentally sustainable and climate-neutral. Malmö gives him an audience that has already spent years trying to turn sustainability evidence into ward-level practice, which is the harder half of the job.

KitNewCare starts from measurement. Counting carbon on its own says very little about whether a change is worth making, so the project works with a four-factor life-cycle assessment that holds health, cost, social and environmental impacts in the same frame. That makes it possible to find the hotspots along a clinical pathway, to compare one intervention with another on the same terms, and to answer the question a hospital manager actually asks, which is whether the change is worth making on Monday morning.

Kidney care is a demanding place to test this. Dialysis is resource-hungry, the data is unusually rich, and the clinical picture is complicated enough that nothing can be quietly simplified away. If the framework holds there, it should travel to other pathways.

Duane will not be the only familiar presence in Malmö. The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare, an associated partner in KitNewCare, is at the conference in the person of its Chief Executive, Rachel Stancliffe. CSH works with the project on capacity building and on the sustainability network being developed within it, and its own reach into the sustainable-healthcare community runs well beyond the consortium.

Both organisations will be in a room with the people who decide whether sustainable interventions are adopted at all. That matters more than visibility. Benchmarking tools tend to get better on contact with the people expected to use them, and conferences of this kind are one of the few places where that contact happens without a project deliverable attached to it.

The Malmö trip also has a first half. On 30 September, the day before the conference, KitNewCare co-hosts a side event with its Horizon Europe sister projects NetZeroAICT and CARING NATURE, on what measurement, digital innovation and operational change have to teach one another. Two days, then: one to set out the project’s own case, one to test it against the people working on the same problem from a different direction.

More information and registration are available here.