Hi Christine,

Thank you for raising this important issue here - I hope others working on this through the ACUPCC network or elsewhere will respond and provide more helpful feedback, but I can just share that from our perspective at Second Nature (supporting org of the ACUPCC network) we see this as an important and challenging issue.  We’re in the process of working helping some other groups - Health Care Without Harm and Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems - to explore ways to better address this very issue – for med schools, university affiliated hospitals, and hospitals in general. However, these conversations are still in the early stages.  (Incidentally they developed the Healthcare Energy Impact Calculator - a very interesting tool that calculates health impacts of emissions: http://www.eichealth.org/)

We will keep you posted as this develops and will share any more information or resources on this topic we can find. 

In some cases it may be necessary to acknowledge the difficulties with addressing medical schools in a comprehensive way in the first iteration of the CAP, and work to build out that section and involve the med school in the process more directly for subsequent iterations / progress reports, though I agree they should be integrated into this process, and applaud your efforts to make that happen at your institution. 

Keep up the great work, and all the best,
Georges

Hi Christine,

   I work at Emory University's Office of Sustainability Initiatives and including our School of Medicine and adjacent healthcare/medical research facilities has been a big issue of discussion for us.  Emory has not signed the ACUPCC, but we have conducted a GHG Emissions Report and included our School of Medicine and the forementioned healthcare facilities in that report.  We are also in the midst of developing a CAP and will include these same areas. 

Feel free to view our GHG Emissions report at:

http://sustainability.emory.edu/cgi-bin/MySQLdb?VIEW=/viewfiles/view_pre...

Jessica Levy

 Hi Christine,

When we conducted our GHG report at the University of Missouri we included our med school, two hospitals, the VA hospital, and the Cancer Research Center that are administered by the university. I know that the Sustainability Coordinator has been working to bring the med school/hospital into the recycling program on campus and they have been very interested in including more sustainability/emissions reduction programs as well. I believe they are even pursuing LEED certification for new additions to the hospital. 

Pat

 We have done a little work with one of the local hospitals.  Based on that, the biggest potential savings is probably in energy, both electricity and heating/cooling. But waste reduction is another big area for savings, and it often can be realized very quickly. One way to reduce waste volume and disposal cost, of course, is to recycle everything possible. Reducing 'red bag' waste is another -- ven the most preliminary observations showed that most of the stuff going into the red bags was ordinary trash or recycling. In fact, the hospital went ahead and removed the red bag cans from most patient and treatment rooms, thus saving a small fortune in specialized disposal costs. Another was to make sure the blue plastic used to wrap surgical and other instruments is recycled instead of being discarded.

A lot of hospitals have gone pretty far with waste reduction and energy savings. Dartmouth Medical School & the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is one good example.  You can find other good insights for hospitals at Health Care Without Harm and the Green Guide for Health Care.  [I can send you a couple of articles about Dartmouth's successes if you contact me directly.] 

Peter Crownfield
   Campus Sustainability Initiative
Alliance for Sustainable Communities-Lehigh Valley
Bethlehem, PA  18015 
<peter@sustainlv.org>