How Hospitals Can Focus On Health In Regards To The Environment
Hospitals are an essential service and the healthcare industry creates a lot of strain on the environment. Because of this, many hospitals are looking to improve on sustainability but are struggling with implementing sustainability at their facilities. The aim of this study was to find overall barriers to and solutions for sustainability for all hospitals. I interned at Harborview Medical Center and worked on filling out their Practice Greenhealth application. Data was collected through communicating with hospital stakeholders via email and interviewing stakeholders over zoom or in person. In addition to this work for my internship, I also conducted independent research by reviewing scholarly articles related to hospital sustainability and conducted secondary interviews that followed the Practice Greenhealth interviews. To address my research questions, I combined answers from the secondary interviews that went more into depth on sustainability at Harborview and information from the scholarly articles to identify both issues with and solutions to implementing sustainability in hospitals. The main findings of this research were that staffing, waste, and money were the main barriers to sustainability. Employing more staff to implement and track progress of sustainability initiatives, adjusting the supply chain, pharmacy, OR, and cafeteria product usage and disposal, and conducting research to find financially feasible environmentally friendly products for each department would support hospitals’ efforts to improve sustainability. This work would support Harborview with their Practice Greenhealth work and would provide financial benefits and improve the efficiency of providing patient care services for all hospitals.
