Will Hospitals Clean Up Their Act?
Last month, we talked about the energy wastes of most healthcare facilities and how a recently built Seattle-area hospital was designed with efficiency and patient comfort in mind. Now we move onto the topic of environmental wastes in American hospitals. The facts are not so inspiring this time around. They do, however, demand a call to action. This is especially the case considering that the latest legislative opportunity to fix the issue wasn’t taken advantage of.
The (Brief) History of Hospital Waste Management
For most of human civilization people have had to worry about the environmental impacts of hospitals. When people knew next to nothing about the dangers of infection and toxicity, biological hazards and medicinal contamination plagued countless patients throughout the centuries.
Flash forward to the American 20th century when hospitals became behemoth buildings and in some ways their own cities. Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act to control the wily dumping of toxic agents into the environment. U.S. hospitals are now regularly monitored to make sure they follow the proper guidelines for disposal per their waste output and that their workers remain vigilant.
The Figures
Even with government regulations, hospitals still produce an enormous amount of both product and medical waste in their day-to-day healthcare responsibilities. In a given year, American hospitals are going to produce 84,000 tons of pharmaceutical waste. That includes vials, bottles, and countless amounts of plastics that are used to package and contain medicine and waste.
Experts say that a minimum of 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and contaminated packaging will be improperly disposed of by hospitals this year, despite EPA monitoring. Drugs originating from hospitals have been detected in the drinking water of 24 separate American municipalities.
Trace amounts of drugs have been found in 80% of American streams.
The Facts
People interested in radiography courses can be assured by the fact that the EPA constantly monitors hospitals, but they may be a little displeased with what such regulatory agencies are forced to spend most of their time focusing on. In just the past five years alone, over 240 hospitals have been cited by the EPA for improper waste disposal. 23 were eventually made to pay fines as high as $37,500 each.
It’s not just the medical waste either. 85% of a hospital’s waste could be non-hazardous paper, cardboard, metal shards, plastics, and glass. That equates to roughly 5,500 tons every single day.
When it comes to non-hazardous waste, the opportune time for change was when the government passed healthcare reform into law back in early 2010. However there was not even so much as a sentence in reference to how to handle the enormous amounts of typical administrative wastes in hospitals.
The Fix
Hospitals built for the future not only need to be constructed with low-energy design in mind, but with low-waste policies built into the structure itself.
The proper sized waste remover generator must be installed. Scrimping on this will only result in additional wastes being disposed of in violation of the law and in violation of nature.
Reliance on hard copy disbursement of information should be avoided by eliminating the space needed to store archives and records in the first place and making the hospital function entirely on informatics.
The aforementioned statistics of the impact of hospitals on the environment should be information plastered in every employee lounge and locker room. Employees must be conscious of the fact that they work in a mini-city, and that the input/output of energy and materials is just as macro in scope.
With the cost of healthcare only rising the truth is clear: hospitals can’t afford to not clean up their act. It’ll simply be a money issue. The costs of fines will be unbearable, and so will the costs of paper and other products that digitization of information can eradicate. Hospitals being built today must consider the certainty of this future if they plan to provide patients with care for the rest of the 21st century.
