How Hospitals are Going Green

In today’s markets customers are increasingly becoming able to make choices in their consumption of services and products. It wasn’t all that long ago that the environmental movement first happened and the terms “green”, or even more recently, “green-wash” were coined. As Joshua Ramo, former editor of Time magazine, explains in his book The Age of the Unthinkable “Change in complex systems, whether they are ecosystems or stock markets, often takes place not in smooth progression but as a sequence of fast catastrophic events”.

So what does that mean for the medical industry, and more specifically, hospitals when it comes to how hospitals are going green?

Understanding how people make their decisions is critical to answering this question. The way in which people perceive value is intrinsically tied to key elements of the service or product they are consuming such as cost, quality, and aesthetics. As people gain increasing opportunity to make more refined choices in their decisions, other factors such as sustainability and those affecting the environment come into play.

The medical industry today is being forced to improve their services in every way possible. They are being forced to make calculated decisions on items; for example, as trivial as it may seem at first glance, the use disposable bedpans versus reuseables. Which costs more? Does the cost account for possible lawsuits due to improperly sterilized bed pans (quality)? Does the perceived, or actual, environmental benefit related to reuse outweigh disposables? To answer these questions the carbon footprint of the products need to be compared; the water consumption of manufacturing needs to be evaluated against operational water usage. The list goes on…

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Mrs. Jenna Paxton is a medical blogger and staff writer at Medshop Australia (blog link:http://www.medshop.com.au/blog/), Australia’s leading supplier of medical equipment (homepage link:http://www.medshop.com.au) and supplies to home, student and professional users.