Healthcare Sustainability: Can Design Education Trigger Systemic Transitions?

The healthcare sector is undergoing a shift towards sustainability, understood as a set of values and practices that integrate planetary health, personal responsibility, and cultural plurality. While Good Health is a central Sustainable Development Goal, its achievement remains complex and fragmented. Establishing fertile ground for systemic change is therefore essential. Recent studies on sustainable healthcare emphasise the importance of education as a starting point for building awareness and capacity within the sector. This paper draws on two educational experiences related to healthcare sustainability and reflects on the role of design education in this transition. It discusses insights from an interdisciplinary European project on sustainable design for MedTech, which informed a second initiative representing a pedagogical evolution toward systemic design. These practices are analysed in light of current debates on design education and sustainability in healthcare. Building on existing literature, the paper identifies four areas where design and healthcare intersect, outlining opportunities for future collaboration between the two fields. Ultimately, it aims to offer practical and theoretical insights to advance the discussion on how systemic design can contribute to developing effective educational pathways that foster sustainability transitions in complex systems such as healthcare.