WIHI - A Podcast from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Health & Fitness:Medicine
Date: April 5, 2012
Featuring:
How green is your hospital? Green, as you know, has become shorthand for everything from recycling to the use of safer products to shrinking one's carbon footprint to preventing pollutants from spewing into the air. There are any number of urgent reasons for the health care sector to be examining its green practices. One of them is just the sheer amount of resources hospitals consume: in the US, that’s tons and tons of water and 836 trillion BTU of energy annually. These same hospitals dispose of 6,600 tons of waste per day. Fortunately, we can all now point to visible efforts at most hospitals to “think and act” a lot greener. But even these well-intentioned efforts have a tendency to stall or lose steam, too often dependent on staff volunteers and lacking a bigger, bolder vision that cuts across the entire organization and how it's run.
Aiming to build on existing progress and to make a giant leap forward on the environmental front, three organizations are now joining forces to launch what’s being dubbed the Healthier Hospitals Initiative. The new effort is anchored by some large hospital systems in the US whose green practices are already exemplary and demonstrate the wisdom behind linking environmental stewardship to efforts to improve safety and reduce health care costs. The Healthier Hospitals Initiative hopes to enlist some 1,000 hospitals in the broad-based campaign, focused on an agenda that includes increased use of safer materials and products for patients and staff alike; reduction of energy consumption and waste; and adoption of policies to ensure sustainability.
WIHI host Madge Kaplan welcomes three guests to the program. Gary Cohen is the co-founder and president of Healthcare Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth, whose work has helped lay the groundwork for this larger initiative. Dr. Amy Collins, who leads a number of efforts at MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, is helping MetroWest garner a number of environmental excellence awards. John Messervy founded the Partners Sustainability Initiative in 2008, and he has tremendous knowledge of the environmental engineering changes possible throughout a large hospital system.
WIHI: Reports from the Frontlines of Effective Crisis Management
WIHI: Primary Care's (New) Pressures and Possibilities
WIHI: Health Care’s Newest Improvers: Patient and Family Advisors
WIHI: The Newest Innovator on the Block: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation
WIHI: A Legible Prescription for Health Care
WIHI: Alert to Change: New Models for Residency Work Hours
WIHI: The Power of Specialty Care – and the Necessity to Use It Wisely
WIHI: The Patient Activist
WIHI: Finding the Will to Bend the Cost Curve
WIHI: Nursing’s New Roadmap: Education, the Workforce, and Health Care Quality
WIHI: The Leaders Needed for the Changes Health Care Needs
WIHI: The Power to Detect and Reduce Harm: IHI’s Global Trigger Tool and Adverse Events in the US
WIHI: Reducing Readmissions, Restoring Revenues: Making Good Care Count
WIHI: The Buzz about Medical Training: It’s (Slowly) Changing
WIHI: Leaders Never Stop Learning
WIHI: Against All Odds: Maternal Survival in Ghana and the US
WIHI: Unprofessional Behavior Not Permitted Here
WIHI: The Image of Better (Radiation) Imaging Practices
WIHI: Learning by Data and by Doing: Low-Cost, High-Quality Health Care in America
WIHI: Coaching’s the Thing for Primary Care Practice
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