Healthcare is an active participant in the climate change and environmental degradation damaging our planet. So, our objective in 2020 is clear: to construct a comprehensive narrative for sustainable design in the widest sense – health system redesign, architecture, landscape, funding models, scientific and digital technologies, products and infrastructure, along with good food, art, performance, and nature.

In recognition of the urgent challenges that lay before us, the main plenary theme for European Healthcare Design 2020 will be healthcare ‘At the Tipping Point: Designing for Population and Planetary Health’. The Call for Papers has noe been launched, with the deadline for submission of abstracts set for 4 December, 2019.

Healthcare is now the biggest ‘industry’ in the world and the single largest component in the economies of many developed countries. It’s a voracious consumer of goods and services, producer of waste and generator of carbon. But if a physician’s primary obligation is to ‘do no harm’, then we must accept that a population-based health system has environmental responsibilities that extend far beyond its delivery of care.

Governments and systems are addressing these with varying degrees of success but the scale of the environmental challenge suggests that programmes of incremental change are insufficient. A fundamental transformation in service models is required. This, in itself, carries significant risk because we know that prescriptive and top-down driven changes to complex systems have unintentional consequences, which are often more disruptive than the reform’s primary objectives.

Organised by Architects for Health and Salus Global Knowledge Exchange, the European Healthcare Design Congress provides a vibrant forum for addressing these issues, bringing together clinicians, policy advisors, academics, architects, designers and artists. Now in our sixth year, we’ve grown into a worldwide virtual community that comes together once a year for two or three days in June at the Royal College of Physicians in central London.