Low value care harms patients (due to adverse events of treatments or secondary unwarranted tests), overburdens healthcare professionals (potentially contributing to burnout), threatens healthcare systems (threatening sustainability due to inefficient use of scarce healthcare resources) and damages the climate (due to negative environmental impact on provision of low value care).1 Low value care is a global phenomenon affecting both high-resource and low-resource settings (and if anything is more harmful in low-resource settings). While the problem of low value care has been recognised for many years, until recently it received insufficient attention.

Choosing Wisely (CW) was founded a decade ago in the USA and initially focused on clinician engagement to raise awareness of the problems of low value care and its negative impacts. It aims to change healthcare professional culture making stewardship of healthcare resources a professional responsibility.2 CW spread rapidly and CW (and similar) campaigns are now common globally.3 CW campaigns have initially used a bottom-up approach developing partnerships with professional associations (initially engaging with physicians’ associations but rapidly spreading to involve other healthcare professional groups) to identify lists of low value care that could be stopped without adverse consequences.

Perhaps one of CW’s earliest findings was that low value care practices are pervasive across all of healthcare. CW campaigns encouraged healthcare professionals to engage patients in conversations about unnecessary tests, treatments and procedures and to help patients make smart and effective choices to ensure high-quality care. They have used a wide range of approaches to promote awareness and de-implementation of low value care, including practical tools for clinicians and guidance (eg, a series published in BMJ on how to implement CW recommendations: https://www.bmj.com/content/reducing-overuse-healthcare). Also, given that patterns of practice are established early in training and persist through practice lifetime, CW campaigns have also engaged with healthcare …