Mapping sustainability practices in the healthcare sector: A systematic literature review and future research agenda

Abstract

Sustainable healthcare means providing affordable, quality medical care without causing undue environmental damage, which is critical for a world just emerging from a debilitating pandemic. This article contends that it is now an opportune time to map the existing knowledge to guide future sustainability research in healthcare. Therefore, this article aims to systematically review and comprehensively analyse the extant literature on sustainability practices in healthcare organizations and propose future research directions based on gaps in the literature. A corpus of 79 articles sourced from five databases and published between 1995 and 2022 was identified for an in-depth review. Following a framework-based systematic literature review, this article offers an organized, retrospective view of the performance using antecedents, decisions, and outcomes (ADO) and Theories–Contexts–Methods (TCM) integrated framework. These frameworks are used to evaluate and understand sustainability practices in the healthcare sector. Additionally, the article shows the thematic evolution of sustainability research in healthcare with the help of five clusters. While the systematic literature review results highlight the large theoretical base, it also reveals the lack of consensus on defining sustainability. The analysis of 79 articles yielded six valuable categories of antecedents with 27 constructs, five categories of decisions with 11 constructs, and two categories of outcomes with 15 constructs. Results also reveal a lack of consensus regarding the influence of sustainability practices on organizational performance across the three sustainability pillars (social, environmental, and economic dimensions). The present review has implications for healthcare service delivery systems and policymakers to help them redesign their services to promote sustainable development goals. Before concluding the article, knowledge gaps and future research directions are structured using the ADO-TCM framework through pertinent ideas for sustainability research in healthcare organizations.