WIHI - A Podcast from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Date: April 5, 2012 Featuring: Gary Cohen, President and Co-Founder, Health Care Without Harm John Messervy, AIA, Director of Capital and Facility Planning, Partners HealthCare, Inc. Amy Collins, MD, Emergency Physician, MetroWest Medical Center; Chair, Go Green Committee, MetroWest How green is your hospital? Green, as you know, has become shorthand for everything from recycling to the use of safer products to shrinking one's carbon footprint to preventing pollutants from spewing into the air. There are any number of urgent reasons for the health care sector to be examining its green practices. One of them is just the sheer amount of resources hospitals consume: in the US, that’s tons and tons of water and 836 trillion BTU of energy annually. These same hospitals dispose of 6,600 tons of waste per day. Fortunately, we can all now point to visible efforts at most hospitals to “think and act” a lot greener. But even these well-intentioned efforts have a tendency to stall or lose steam, too often depende