'Going green' doesn't mean spending a lot of green

Hospitals facing budget shortfalls are weary of "going green" because they think it will cost them more money - but this is a myth.

Conservation of hospital waste can provide immediate savings, according to Victoria Stewart, business director of the perioperative service at University of Maryland Medical Center.

Stewart and Joan Plisko, technical director of Maryland Hospitals for a Healthy Environment, will be headlining a session at HFMA's 2009 ANI conference entitled "The Financials of Going Green: University of Maryland Medical Center Case Study", which will be held Wednesday, June 17 from 1:30-2:45 p.m.

Maryland Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (MDH2E) is an initiative funded by local foundations that seeks to educate Maryland healthcare professionals about the significant environmental impacts of the healthcare industry and the potential solutions.

Plisko says MDH2E has made a positive impact across the state, with over half of all hospitals forming a green team. She will be discussing healthcare's contribution to the global environment in four categories - environmental footprint, water usage, toxic substances, energy consumption and wastage - and offering cost effective solutions to minimizing them.

Stewart will be speaking about UMMC's experience of "going green." She is part of UMMC's Green Team, which was formed two years ago as part of the hospital's effort to conserve, reduce, reuse and recycle. UMMC's target goals were to reach operating savings of $833, 000 and capital savings of  $905,000, which Stewart says have been "hit."

Under the initiative Stewart said the team began examining environmentally preferable purchasing (EPP). This meant looking at things like how to reduce packaging costs and resterilizing supplies, she said.

Resterilizing sharps containers was one example of an EPP effort that paid off immediately, with the hospital realizing $77,000 annual savings in containers, labor and disposal. UMMC can now use a sharps container up to 500 times before it is sent to the incinerator, says Stewart.

The Green Team's initiative was also about evaluating sustainable alternatives. Plisko points out that there is a difference between "greening" and sustainability. "Greening is a laundry list of waste reduction," she says. "Sustainability is the greening as well as the ethos or value system that is imbedded in the culture for which a hospital operates."

Stewart says sustainability also means examining what you may be exposing your employees to and what the long term costs associated with it may be.

Nurses have been highly impacted by a history of behaviors that don't promote good health, said Plisko. For example, some studies suggest that nurses and cleaning staff have the highest rate of work-related asthma. She says MDH2E is working to change this paradigm and sees a lot of opportunity to do this by "going green."