|
5 ways to make your practice
greener
- Start a "green team" to raise
awareness and lobby for change
- Set a timer to turn down
heating by three degrees overnight and turn
off computers and lights when the office is
closed
- Use low-toxicity, low-water
cleaning methods
- Encourage staffers to use
public transportation, carpool, cycle and walk
- Create a recycling policy
and keep discarded paper to rebind to make scratchpads
|
There's no question, hospitals
are big polluters. From their enormous energy usage
to incinerators for biomedical waste to triple-layers
of sterile wrapping for disposable medical instruments
like syringes, our healthcare institutions leave a mammoth
environmental footprint.
Once upon a time, the federal government
realized there was a problem and came up with incentives
to encourage hospitals to clean up their act. But last
March, in a woefully underreported act, the Conservative
government pulled the plug on the program.
Called the Energy Innovators Initiative
(EII), created by Natural Resources Canada in 1998,
the program was devised to provide energy-efficiency
retrofit grants of up to $250,000 to Canadian businesses.
When it was axed in favour of a new department called
EnerGuide for Existing Buildings, the government also
took the opportunity to cancel a contract that had been
given to the nonprofit Canadian College of Health Services
Executives (CCHSE) to act as liaison to the healthcare
industry. Over its seven years, that contract garnered
environmentally friendly retrofit funding for over 450
healthcare corporations across the country.
RETROGRADE
POLICY
Kent Waddington, a founding member of the Canadian Coalition
for Green Health Care, was the coordinator in charge
of the erstwhile CCHSE contract. When it was cut in
March, he lost the job he'd been doing for seven years.
"The program had been extremely successful," he explained.
The benefits built on one another: reducing energy expenditure
reduced pollution and cut fuel use, which saved money,
and that money could then be used for healthcare.
"A lot of people were very concerned
when the program was cancelled," he said. "The general
consensus among people I speak with in healthcare is
that the government is failing to adequately address
environmental issues."
This move by the government is
in direct opposition to the trend in other countries,
notes former Green Party of Canada leader and public
health physician Dr Trevor Hancock. In the UK earlier
this month, he points out, a £100 million fund
was established to help British hospitals reduce emissions
and improve energy efficiency in order to combat global
warming.
On January 17, the federal government
announced a $230 million investment over the next four
years in clean energy technologies, including incentives
for energy-efficient homes. At press time, the details
of the plan still had not been announced but no mention
had been made of the healthcare industry.
ONE
MAN'S CRUSADE
Dr Jean Zigby, a young family physician from Montreal,
is also lamenting the decision to end the contract with
CCHSE. "It was unfortunately a shortsighted move on
the part of our government," he says. "Energy efficiency
is probably the most cost-effective way of reducing
our effects on the environment."
Dr Zigby's involvement in the environmentalism
movement began about five years ago when he started
reading about pollution and global warming. "To my none-too-great
surprise, it was as I feared: we are poor stewards of
the environment," he says. He discovered, for instance,
that Canadian hospitals can be up to six times as polluting
as their Scandinavian counterparts. "It doesn't make
sense that physicians who are first and foremost supposed
to not be causing harm, are actually causing a lot of
harm with support of a dangerous healthcare system."
Dr Zigby's discomfort with the
environmental impact of his profession grew to the point
that in late 2002 he decided to take a sabbatical from
his practice in downtown Montreal to figure out how
to make his community's clinics greener. "I said to
myself, let's see what one physician can do."
What he has accomplished since
has propelled him to national renown as a champion of
green healthcare, and earned him a Canadian Environmental
Award in 2006. Now vice-president of Canadian Association
of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), Dr Zigby has
been the engine behind phenomenal changes at his clinic.
For instance, he and his colleagues now own five bicycles
they use to make home-care visits. He has also exerted
enormous influence in helping other Quebec healthcare
facilities diminish their environmental impact by designing
a guidebook on waste reduction, recycling, reducing
energy consumption, among other things. The cuts to
the CCHSE contract affected him directly: his clinic
received grants from EII in the past.
Doctors interested in green healthcare,
says Dr Zigby, should establish a "green team" at their
hospitals or clinics to raise awareness among staff
and community members. "Be vocal and speak out about
your concerns," he says.
"People look up to physicians,"
says Mr Waddington. "If they are seen as leading the
charge on environmental issues, others may well follow."
|
