Less than a third of consumers say health services are doing enough to lessen environmental impact

Perhaps not right at the top of their pre-purchase check list, but consumers seem to increasingly factor in sustainability - of the products they’re buying and the brands they’re buying from. With companies across the board trying to up their sustainability game, which industries do consumers think are doing enough to minimize their impact on the environment?

A recent YouGov survey asked consumers across 17 international markets about which industries they think are doing enough or not enough to minimize their impact on the environment. In this piece we focus on hospitals/health services.

Hospitals/health services enjoy the most favorable view in this regard among consumers - nearly a third (31%) of them say this industry is doing enough to minimize its impact on the environment. However, 40% of consumers still feel that the health service industry isn’t doing enough.

The other top industries where consumers think the companies are doing enough to minimize their environmental impact are hotels (24%) and online retailers (23%).

Less than two in ten (17%) consumers feel airlines are doing enough to minimize their impact on the environment. Conversely, airlines lead the table in terms of consumers thinking the industry isn’t doing enough at 59%.

Similar proportions of consumers say automotive companies (57%) and food/grocery manufacturers (55%) aren’t doing enough either.

When it comes to hospitals/health services in particular, the lead opinion seems to be that the industry isn’t doing enough to minimize its impact on the environment, with 38% of men and 41% of women holding this opinion.

However, men (34%) are more likely than women (27%) to say that this industry is doing enough to minimize its impact on the environment.

We now look at what consumers across countries feel about hospitals/health services’ efforts to minimize their impact on the environment.

UAE accounts for largest proportion of consumers who say hospitals are doing enough to minimize their impact on the environment; Italy accounts for the least.

UAE leads all our markets with the largest proportion of consumers (57%) who feel hospitals/health services are doing enough to minimize their impact on the environment. India (42%) and Hong Kong (41%) follow.

On the other hand, Italians (18%), Danes (21%) and the Polish (21%) are the least likely to say so.

In the US, consumers are more likely to say hospitals aren’t doing enough to minimize their impact on the environment (34%) than say that they are doing enough (25%).

It’s a similar story in Great Britain - less than a quarter (24%) of consumers here say this industry is doing enough, while 37% of them feel it isn’t.

Asians are more likely than Europeans to say that the health service industry does enough to minimize its impact on the environment. The highest proportion of consumers in Asia who say so is 42% (in Urban India) whereas in Europe, the figure stands seven percentage-points lower at 35% (Spain).

But consumers in Europe and Asia are more or less on the same page when it comes to saying the health service industry isn’t doing enough to minimize its impact on the environment. At more than half (51%), Italy leads our markets in Europe. Indonesia (55%) has the largest share of consumers who have this opinion, not just in Asia but across all markets surveyed.

In the Nordics, equal proportions of consumers in Denmark and Sweden (32% each) feel the health services industry isn’t doing enough to minimize its impact on the environment. Data shows that Swedes (30%) are more likely than Danes (21%) to say hospitals are doing enough to minimize their impact on the environment.

Explore our living data - for free

Discover more health and pharma content  here

Want to run your own research? Run a survey now

Make smarter business decisions with better intelligence. Understand exactly what your audience is thinking by leveraging our panel of 20 million+ members. Speak with us today.

Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 17 markets with sample sizes varying between 509 and 2003 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in July 2023. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash