by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | January 30, 2014
From the January 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
LW: For climate change we consider mitigation strategies. For instance, having a program in place to encourage staff to bicycle to work, or working with anesthesiologists to use different anesthetic gases than some of the traditional choices, since some gases can be more than 2,000 times more potent than CO2.
HCBN: It seems nearly every company has introduced “green” or “eco-friendly” solutions. What should health care facilities look for in order to verify those claims?
LW: They should look for third party verification like Green Seal or EnergyStar, for example. We have also worked with (group purchasing organizations) to clarify the information about contracted products. We sat down with the five largest GPOs in the country and got them to standardize the formats of their RFPs as it relates to environmental disclosure. They now ask environmental disclosure questions for medical products so that hospitals would have a chance to see what was in the products they were considering for purchase off of the GPO contracts.
Overall, from a Practice Greenhealth view though, we won’t endorse something as a “green” product simply because there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done. So we try to focus our efforts on the environmental attributes of products. We don’t want to say something is the safest option and then have news two years down the line come out showing that it’s just as bad or worse than the product it was replacing.
HCBN: What’s the number one piece of advice you would give to a hospital considering eco-friendly options?
LW: If someone’s new to sustainability work, I think the biggest thing they should do is do an audit. We offer an eco checklist that shows where there are opportunities and things they might not have thought of yet. And it doesn’t have to be financially daunting to take the first step. There are a lot of projects that can be implemented for minimal to no cost, but still have a big payback.
HCBN: What reasons do facilities give for not going green?
LW: Cost and staff. Some people think all green initiatives require a lot of capital. They are thinking too big to start. Our role is to try to help educate them and work within a level of action they’re comfortable with in staff training or technology updates.
For staff, one of the first things they might look at is education about red bag versus regular waste. Red bag waste costs facilities up to ten times more than regular waste to dispose of, yet there’s a tendency to use it even for trash that isn’t regulated medical waste.
