Abstract
In the last 150 years, healthcare has become a large scale multidisciplinary human activity that involves the interaction of social, technological, legal, political, and economical issues. To be highlighted, healthcare may represent 4.6% to 8.5% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
Extracorporeal organ support, one of the most life-saving interventions in emergency and critical care medicine, represents a sustainability challenge because of the amount of resources needed for every single patient and the increasing number of expected cases in the years to come.
Given that the conservation of essential resources for human life relies on the sustainability of each and all of the human activities, the development of greener healthcare policies regarding extracorporeal life support has been recognized to be of utmost importance.
Systematic, organized research should be implemented in order to establish evidence based standardized, large scale guidelines and procedures aimed not only improve survival of patients, but to ensure sustainability. Of note, the place and window of opportunity that extracorporeal organ support represent towards a greener global healthcare remains to be fully described.
Most probably, within the following years, extracorporeal organ support will represent an inflexion point into diminishing the use of further healthcare resources (i.e. early home-based ultrafiltration may preventing recurrent hospital admissions because of decompensated hearth failure).
The present manuscript is aimed to summarize the importance, challenges and current perspectives on the way to achieve sustainability of extracorporeal organ support.