NCT07505238

Informing Patients About Their Surgery's Environmental Impact: an Effective Pathway to Sustainable Healthcare?

• Status: Not Yet Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 400 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of Amsterdam · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The healthcare sector contributes significantly to climate change. Reducing the number of patients receiving resource-intensive procedures such as surgery can lower carbon emissions, particularly when two treatments with comparable clinical outcomes are available. Nevertheless, the impact of incorporating environmental considerations into patients' decision-making processes remains underexplored. The investigators examine how including information about the environmental impact of treatment options in a gallstone decision aid affects patients' real-life choice between surgery and the more sustainable alternative of conservative treatment. Moreover, the investigators examine whether factors such as severity of symptoms moderate the relation between sustainability information and patients' treatment choice. An exploratory vignette study informed the hypotheses that will be tested among actual patients with gallstones making actual treatment decisions. The results of this ecologically valid study have implications for both clinical practice and healthcare policy by offering insight into the effectiveness of pathways to include patients in the transition towards sustainable healthcare.

Conditions

• Sustainability
• Gallstone
• Decision Aid
• Decision Making ,Shared

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Sustainability added to decision aid	The intervention decision aid includes a page with information about the environmental impact of surgical removal of the gallbladder, and a control condition, which includes no such information. Besides information about the environmental impact of gallbladder surgery, the intervention and control conditions will be identical. At the end of the decision aid patients will be debriefed in general phrasing (i.e., the aim of this study was to examine which factors affect treatment choice) to prevent influencing the actual decision. Approximately three months after patients received the decision aid, patients will receive an invitation via the PatientPlus portal to complete a survey in which the investigators inquire about their final treatment decision (first reminder after one week, second reminder after two weeks). At the end of this survey, patients will be debriefed about the aim of examining how information about the environmental impact of surgery affects treatment choice.

Timeline

• Start date: 2026-04-01
• Primary completion: 2027-04-01
• Completion: 2027-07-01
• First posted: 2026-04-01
• Last updated: 2026-04-01

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Netherlands