Healthcare LCA Masterclass: understanding and constructing a life cycle assessment

Workshop design

This full-day workshop will move you from broad contextual understandings into issues and underpinnings via the LCA process and publications. Participants can expect to gain knowledge of:

ü  Life cycle thinking

ü  Healthcare carbon literacy and its importance

ü  The purpose and comparisons of different healthcare carbon footprint analysis methodologies

ü  In depth understanding of national, state (analysis of publications) and organisational (presentation of results) level healthcare carbon footprints

ü  An understanding of the critical components of a LCA

ü  Practical implications of clinical LCA. 

Description

Climate change impacts health and wellbeing, yet the Australian healthcare sector is estimated to be the source of over 7% of Australia’s total carbon emissions. As health services are starting to reduce their carbon emissions, it is important that decision makers and clinicians gain an understanding of how carbon footprints are determined from national to organisational to product level, as well as having the ability to critique the ever-increasing quantity of carbon footprints using life cycle assessment (LCA) being published in medical journals. 

This in-person workshop will involve detailed presentations and facilitated discussion by leading Australian experts in the field. 

Details of attendance

When: Monday 29^th June 2026
Time: 9:00am to 5:00pm  
Where: South Room at the Woodward Conference Centre,
Address: Level 10, Melbourne Law School, 185 Pelham St, Carlton 3053
Cost: 
$600 Adult
$400 Concession for Students and UoM staff
Morning tea; lunch and afternoon tea are included. Please register any dietary restrictions at catherine.oshea@unimelb.edu.au
How to get there: Close to Parkville train station and multiple tram lines. Tram routes 1, 3, 5, 6, 16, 19, 64, 67, 72 are the main services stopping directly at the University.

Who you will learn from: 

Dr Scott McAlister 
Scott is a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. Since 2005 he has worked as a consultant, undertaking environmental life cycle assessments for a wide variety of industries. Starting in 2009 he became involved in performing assessments in healthcare, and subsequently authored and co-authored papers on the environmental impacts of a range of medical devices and interventions.  
Leading on from this, Scott has recently completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne on decarbonising healthcare. His research focused on how to incorporate carbon impacts into health technology assessments, calculating the carbon footprint of pathology testing and diagnostic imaging, the environmental and economic benefits of reducing pathology testing in a hospital department, and the incidence of unnecessary preoperative pathology testing. His work is currently focused on the carbon impacts of low-value care. 

Associate Professor Forbes McGain 
Forbes McGain is the inaugural Associate Dean, Healthcare Sustainability, in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is an anaesthetist and intensive care physician at Western Health, Melbourne, Australia, and an Associate Professor (Medicine) at the University of Sydney.  
 He enjoys being involved in research, teaching and education at the hospital, university and beyond. Forbes remains passionate about making seemingly small environmental sustainability changes to how we practice medicine that become magnified through every nations’ hospitals. His love of nature affects everything he does at work, home, and well, anywhere…