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: Working Toward Health Equity
WIHI: SBAR: Structured Communication and Psychological Safety in Health Care
WIHI: Violence Prevention and Community Health
WIHI: Patients as Partners in QI Research
WIHI: New Leadership Skills for Better Health and Health Care
WIHI: Improving Safety and Satisfaction in Ambulatory Care
WIHI: Who’s Conversation Ready? How Health Care Can Respect End-of-Life Wishes
WIHI: New Staffing Models for Primary Care
WIHI: Recognizing Person- and Family-Centered Care: Always Events at IHI
WIHI: On the (Virtual) Road with Mobile Clinics and Population Health
WIHI: Integrating Physical and Behavioral Health
WIHI: Slowdown in the Growth of US Health Care Spending
WIHI: The Ground Game of the Partnership for Patients
WIHI: Large-Scale Change Across a Country: Learning from Scotland
WIHI: Measure Up, (Blood) Pressure Down: 80% by 2016
WIHI: Reliable Practices for Responding to Natural Disasters: Lessons from Long Island Jewish and Hurricane Sandy
WIHI: Home for Life, Aging, and Aging in Place
WIHI: Engaging Patients in Safety — Live from London and the International Forum on Quality and Safety
WIHI: Community Health Needs Assessments, Part 2: Lessons from North Carolina
WIHI: Community Health Needs Assessments, Part 1
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