For this week’s post I am going to talk a bit about my day job. As one can imagine, working in greening healthcare is much more complex than just lowering energy and water use in hospitals and nursing homes. And this is exactly why I love my current job. Not too weeks are alike.
At the beginning of my job three years ago, I counted no less than 30 different topics that fall within my responsibiliity as CTEES (Conseiller en Transition Energétique et Ecologique en Santé, or Healthcare Energy Transition and Sustainability Advisor, my current job title)
This week I had the privilege to go to Paris for the first national greening healthcare practices event, organized by Anap (French Agency for Care Performance). The program was fascinating, with many learned societies and professional associations having sent representatives to talk about how their very specialized field are adapting to lower carbon emisions and resource consumption.
While this was a national event and the first of its kind, we were lucky to inspire ourselves from example overseas with brilliant guests from the British NHS, a leading hospital in the Netherlands or the French embassy in Denmark.
There are now many tools and programs and ideas to get people onboard and to just lower greenhouse gases emissions and resource use across the sector, and these are good news as according to the French association The Shift Project, the healthcare sector is responsible for 8 percent of French national greenhouse gases emissions.
Out of this all, energy used in buildings is a very small part. The majority of the climate impact of hospitals and other healthcare facilities turns out to come from drugs, mediciie and medical devices. If for the past decades single use tools have had the favor of practitioners, nowadays, getting back to sterlized devices that can be cleaned and reused on other patients reduces costs, reduces emissions and is as safe and practical.
As an example among others, “greening” anesthesia is a huge topic as anesthesic gases can be very harmful to the planet. Nitrous oxide is 270 worse than CO2 when it comes to its global warming potential (GWP) and also contributes to depleting the ozone layer. Halogen gases such as sevoflurane and desflurane are 144 and 2540 times worse than CO2 when it comes to their GWP (respectively). Suddenly your anesthesia carries a large footprint.
Nursing assistants, nursess, doctors and admin employees… Everyone has a role to play. in the energy and ecological transition of the healthcare sector as systemic challenges require a systemic response.
The two heatwaves that struck France and Europe in May and June are just harbingers of catastrophic climate change if we do not act adequately. Up until now, our response have been abject in terms of adaptation or mitigation. We can and we need to do much better, whether in healthcare or as a society as a whole.
