Rhode Island Hospitals for Healthy Environment (RI H2E)
February 2011
Join regional health care professionals for a learning and networking event on creating an environmentally sustainable environment for hospital staff, patients and communities in Rhode Island. Through this event, we hope to bring all the interested health care facilities in Rhode Island to have an open discussion on creating an environmentally sustainable environment for hospital staff, patients and communities. We will provide a wealth of practical tools and resources to educate, motivate, and facilitate best environmental practices that increase operational efficiency, create extraordinary environmental benefits, save costs and support an environmentally sustainable system that improves patient outcomes, workplace safety and prevent illnesses.
The goal of the event is to improve environmental health and patient safety by reducing 1. health care’s consumption of energy, water and raw materials and generation of waste and 2. the use and exposure to persistent, bio-accumulative, toxic chemicals. Alternatively, we will develop way to engage in environmentally preferred purchasing, actively seeking alternative sustainable products, engaging in inventory management, transitioning to renewable energy sources, waste management, recycling programs, and by purchasing and serving healthy foods made in sustainable ways. A variety of educational and information sharing activities will be pursued focused on pollution prevention and toxics minimization.
Keynote Speaker
Gary Cohen
President and Co-Founder
Health Care Without Harm
Featured Healthy Hospital Project
Joan Plisko
Technical Director
Maryland Hospitals for Healthy Environment (MDH2E)Â
Featured topics
- Best practices for environmentally preferable purchasingÂ
- Use safer chemicals/products
- Green cleaningÂ
- Procurement and service of sustainable foods
- Management of hospital wasteÂ
- Waste streams in hospitals
- Waste reduction, recyclingÂ
- Medical reprocessingÂ
Program
8:30 – 9:00AM Registration/Breakfast
9:00 – 9:15AM Welcome and Introductions
9:15 – 10:00AM Keynote address, Gary Cohen
President and Co-Founder Health Care Without Harm
10:00 – 10:45AM Joan Plisko
Maryland Hospitals for Healthy Environment (MDH2E)
10:45 – 11:00AM Break
11:00 – 12:30 AM Environmentally Preferable Purchasing
12:30 – 1:00PM Hazardous Pharmaceutical Waste Management
Healthy Hospitals: An Overview
The health care sector is in the business of improving the health and wellbeing and preventing recurring illnesses by countering unhealthy and harmful practices of patients, staff, and the community. However, the health care industry today is part of a system that is highly environmentally unsustainable, and contributes significantly to pollution.
Every day, health care professionals confront low-level but repeated exposures to mixtures of hazardous materials that include residues from medications, anesthetic gases, sterilizing and disinfecting chemicals, radiation, latex, cleaning chemicals, hand and skin disinfection products, and even mercury escaping from broken medical equipment. The health care sector has a large environmental footprint. Health facilities create 6,600 tons of waste per day, hospitals are the second most energy intensive buildings in the US and generate significant greenhouse gas emissions. Health care professionals, particularly nurses have a high chemical burden and are at increased risk of chemical and pharmaceutical exposure so are health care patients.
A series of recent reports by National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Environmental working Group (EWG), the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) have shown strong links between hazardous chemical use in the health care sector and chronic diseases. According to NIOSH, health care workers are being widely exposed to both hazardous drugs and chemical hazards at work and share many of the same types of exposures to chemicals and hazards found in blue collar industrial settings. The first ever national survey on nurses’ exposures to chemicals, pharmaceuticals and radiation on the job by the Environmental Working Group suggests there are links between serious health problems such as cancer, asthma, miscarriages and children's birth defects. PSR conducted the first biomonitoring investigation of 20 health care professionals and found all of the 20 participating health professionals had at least 24 of the 62 individual chemicals in their body and two participants had as many as 39 chemicals detected. Both levels of DEHP and its metabolites and triclosan in the health professionals were slightly elevated than the CDC biomonitoring levels for the general population for these compounds.
The crisis of chronic disease is parallel to the ecological crisis in many such cases. The health care sectors especially have a responsibility to minimize environmental unsustainable practices that are harmful to human health and the environment. There is real concern in the health community about these links between widespread toxic exposure and the epidemic of chronic disease in the U.S health care system. Addressing the ecological crisis is more than ever essential to the prevention of chronic disease crisis. The health care sector has begun to heed this warning and has begun to transform itself by developing more ecologically sustainable operational practices. Coalitions like Hospitals for a Healthy Environment, Healthier Hospitals Initiative and Maryland Hospitals for a Healthy Environment are leading this initiative to develop an engaged health care community that are environmentally aware, healing environments that recognizes the links between the choices we make and our health. Their agenda is to chart a path to a healthier, more sustainable and cost effective health care system for the patients, workers, their communities and the global environment.
More than any other sector, the health care sector must understand better the implications behind serious threats like toxic pollution and global warming and its effect on our health.
Info on H2E by state and where RI stands. In Rhode Island, we have an obligation to learn, share and engage our health care sector to be part of this larger environmentally sustainable health care movement and guide public policy for healthy environments.
Please join the Rhode Island Hospitals for Healthy Environment for our first state-wide meeting on environmental sustainability in health care in conjunction with Women and Infants Hospital, Health Care Without Harm and Maryland Hospitals for a Healthy Environment. We also have support from SEIU local 1199 and are soliciting direct support from the Rhode Island Department of Health and the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
Through this learning and networking event, we hope to bring all the interested health care facilities in Rhode Island to have an open discussion on creating an environmentally sustainable environment for hospital staff, patients and communities. We will provide a wealth of practical tools and resources to educate, motivate, and facilitate best environmental practices that increase operational efficiency, create extraordinary environmental benefits, save costs and support an environmentally sustainable system that improves patient outcomes, workplace safety and prevent illnesses.
The goal of the event is to improve environmental health and patient safety by reducing 1. health care’s consumption of energy, water and raw materials and generation of waste and 2. the use and exposure to persistent, bio-accumulative, toxic chemicals. Alternatively, we will develop way to engage in environmentally preferred purchasing, actively seeking alternative sustainable products, engaging in inventory management, transitioning to renewable energy sources, waste management, recycling programs, and by purchasing and serving healthy foods made in sustainable ways. A variety of educational and information sharing activities will be pursued focused on pollution prevention and toxics minimization.
Resources
1. Nurses' Health and Workplace Exposures to Hazardous Substances. Environmental Working Group, 2007. http://www.ewg.org/reports/nursesurvey
2. State of the Sector: Health care and Social Assistance NIOSH 2009
3. A snap shot of chemicals in doctors and nurses. Physicians for Social Responsibility 2009.
4. Nurses and the environment, American Nurses Association
5. Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E)
6. Healthier Hospitals Initiative (HHI)