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: End-of-Life Care and How Communities Can Become "Conversation Ready"
WIHI: 10 Things Every Hospital Needs to Know to Be Safe
WIHI: The Road to Team-Based Primary Care and Behavioral Health
WIHI: 100 Million Healthier Lives by 2020
WIHI: Optimizing Safety with the Electronic Health Record: The Latest on Glitches and Fixes from the Frontlines
WIHI: Better Care and Better Value for Hip and Knee Replacement
WIHI: Mental Health Care in the Hospital: Preventing Harm, Promoting Safety
WIHI: From Here to CLER: Graduate Medical Education and the Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER)
WIHI: Tread Water No More! Making Sense of Patient Experience Data
WIHI: Preventing Financial Harm to Patients: The Costs of Care Initiative
WIHI: From Prehospital to In-Hospital: The Continuum for Time-Sensitive Care
WIHI: New Roles, New Routes for Managing Populations
WIHI: Making the Work of QI Less Draining and More Sustaining
WIHI: The Patient-Centered Medical Home: Early Results, Tough Scrutiny
WIHI: Partnering with Patients for Safety: The Next Phase of Work and Commitment
WIHI: Transforming Tensions and Tempers on Health Care Teams
WIHI: Reclaiming Empathy — Best Practices for Engaging with Patients
WIHI: Bright Spots for Patients with Complex Needs
WIHI: How High? How Low? Shared Decision Making Amidst Shifting (Hypertension) Guidelines
WIHI: Mobilizing Skilled Nursing Facilities to Reduce Avoidable Rehospitalizations
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